THE SERENDIPITY OF THINGS

As mentioned earlier I have been reading Melvyn Bragg's novel "Crystal Rooms". In my mornings after breakfast I have been trying to cultivate the habit of reading a bit of poetry. Today I was reading Paul Muldoon's (PM) third collection "Why Brownlee Left". Muldoon is from Armagh, one of the six counties neighbours of Seamus Heaney's County Derry, what is in the soil of that damp and windswept corner of Ireland that it produces such a poetic harvesting?

The opening poem by PM is called "Whim" the first two lines of which are :-

"She was sitting with a pint and a small one

That afternoon in the Europa Hotel"

Funny how things suddenly jolt into consciousness, In Melvyn Bragg's novel, "Crystal Rooms" just read, there is the following reference to the Europa Hotel in Belfast : -

"Mark realised that they had reached the Europa Hotel in the middle of town without seeing a single soldier. He knew that they were de-escalating in the city centre but he was still impressed. The Europa had the same manufactured calm- like fake antiques of any international hotel. Mark always noticed how much taunting glass there was in the building and in the glass porch flaunted by the Grand Opera House next door and the glass in the new city centre. Fragility showing it's contempt for violence"

These references to the Europa Hotel, strike the anvil of my past; when for sure, soldiers were much in presence in vicinity of the Europa Hotel . During the worst of the bombing campaign by the Provo's in the early to mid 1970's I spent a lot of time in Ulster, and was a regular guest at the Europa. To begin with it was considered safe, but following a night when the hotel was evacuated after the IRA planted a bomb on the reception desk, it clearly became in play. I moved away the next day, but the terrorists won-out, soon it was blown up by means of a taxi-bomb left in the railway car park adjacent which breached the gable end of the building. When I next stayed there, the plaster walls of my room were pitted with the remnant tell-tale signs of exploding glass.

So two recent books unexpectedly thrust the Europa Hotel to the front of my mind. I think Muldoon is the better guide, Melvyn Bragg gets the spelling of the Divis Flats wrong, and those who have tramped the lower Falls Road from time to time, know it is "Divis" long gone the flats are but the name is the same.