I'm glad it's not like this all the time

A week or two ago I wrote a post all about watching Derry City play in a chip shop in Ballymena - that's me watching it in a chip shop, not them playing in a chip shop. It was a post of joy and optimism. A post proclaiming love and peace in a country thought of as a recovering war zone. I was uplifted writing it.

Now I am crestfallen.Coming from Northern Ireland it is hard to avoid topics of religion and politics. If you see a film in NI it generally mentions the "situation" Plays set in Ulster tend to have a group of loyalists and a group of republicans playing montagues and capulets, stand up comedy routines tend to have at least one Big Ian reference - they're not funny otherwise. It's hard to avoid these topics, but not impossible. A group of us make short films in this country and I can't remember one reference to "the troubles" - unless you count a prank involving an Irishman in Camp David wearing a balaclava.

I had intended this blog to be sectarian free but thinking back over the past couple of months I can point to at least six posts with something to do with political religion in Northern Ireland. and here I am about to write number seven - I guess I failed.

You see it's like this. Derry were playing the return leg of that football tie in Paris last night. I went back to Ballymena to stand outside that chip shop waving my rangeltic scarf (creating it involved mutilating two separate football scarves to make one but I think it was worth it) If I thought I would witness a similiar show of bon ami I was sadly mistaken. Two drunks paying no attention to the football and a rather angry looking youth who called me jaffa scum because I was wearing a hearts shirt. I left despondent.

A friend of mine lives in a loyalist area of Derry, or should we say Londonderry. Her nephew is the result of a mixed marriage and is being brought up a a Protestant in a Catholic area. She told me today how she had picked him up from Boys' Brigade last night. They had gone to buy stickers in a shop near her house and as they were leaving the shop he looked up at her and said, "It's just as well we went to your shop and not ours. Cause if we went to ours they would have see me in this uniform and known I was Protestant." He's four. So young, so cynical. She said it nearly brought tears to her eyes - it very nearly brought tears to mine.

Things have improved. Things are improving. I just wish they'd hurry up a bit.