The hippopotamus may not look like a speedy or nimble creature but they can outrun a man on land and swim faster than a man in the water. This all means that, if you want to beat one, it’s all down to the bike ride. Remember that next time one enters your triathlon.
You may wonder what this has to do with Belfast which is is a wonderful city, situated in some glorious countryside but not known for its links to the hippopotamus . Well, I have to say that I never felt anything other than welcome in Northern Ireland except, perhaps, tired, I did feel tired. The reason for this is simple and straightforward and is the fault of hippopotamuses.
You might not be aware, but the Hippopotamus Olympics is held in Room 207 of the Malmaison Hotel on Victoria Street in Belfast. This is a very nice hotel, apart from the Hippopotamus Olympics. The first event is hippo hopscotch which is where the animals take it in turns, over the course of about an hour, to hop and skip across Room 207. This event starts at about nine-thirty in the evening and is immediately followed by hippo bicycling where squeaky bikes are ridden around the room by the creatures. This event lasts for another hour. After that, it appears to be ball balancing where hippos take it in turn to balance on a large ball and, quite often, fall off. I only know all of this because I stayed in Room 107 which is directly underneath the venue.
At least I think that’s what was happening above me. On a completely unrelated note, having sex in hotels is very much like singing in a library or shouting whilst riding mountain bikes through the forest. It might well be fun for those taking part but it offers little enjoyment to everybody else. I often hear people in hotels clearly having more fun than me. Sometimes it’s sex, other times it’s drinking and laughing and parties. For most people, a hotel is a step away from their real life, it’s their bunking off, so they can be their fun self. They can have a pudding after dinner, they can drink more than they normally would, they can have loud and enthusiastic sex, they can have a big breakfast the next morning. For me, it’s a couple of nights of every week, so it is my life and I have a very dull routine.
In the evening, if I’ve taken the opportunity to have a quick look around wherever I’m staying, I will grab something to eat and then write up my notes for the day. Between eight-thirty and nine-thirty I nod in front of the TV, not watching much of whatever is on. Tonight it’s one of the forty-seven different shows following police officers on duty and they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now as it’s called something like Cops at the Shops and follows shoplifters with blurred faces getting nicked for sticking rump steaks down their trousers or taking a bag lined with tin foil into Top Shop. At nine-thirty I give up and go to bed and sleep soundly until ten-thirty when I listen to doors closing and people having more fun than me. This generally takes me through to midnight when I get back to sleep until four when I spend an hour pretending I don’t need a wee before I get up and have a wee. I will then doze fitfully for two hours before finally getting back to sleep ten minutes before my alarm goes off at six-fifteen. So, if I come across as a little grumpy on the flight home, now you know why.
Belfast is served by two airports. Belfast International Airport started life as a training ground for the Royal Flying Corps in 1917 and the first civilian passengers didn’t fly from there until 1933 when a service to the old Renfrew Airport at Glasgow started. It remained a military base, though, known as RAF Aldergrove and, during the Second World War, it was used mainly by Coastal Command. Lockheed Hudsons and Consolidated Liberators flew from here on anti-submarine patrols, protecting the shipping in the Atlantic. Coastal Command stayed at Aldergrove until the 1960s and the RAF still have a small presence here today. Mostly, though, the military presence is maintained by the Army.
I was flying home from Belfast City Airport which is named after George Best, the person who you would least like to have anything to do with your transportation by air. Liverpool was the first airport in the UK to adopt a star, taking the lead from the United States. There are some great airport names around the world. Chicago O’Hare is named after a US Navy fighter pilot, that seems reasonable; Sonoma County Airport in California is named after Charles M. Schulz, the creator of the flying ace Snoopy; Alexander Kartveli Batumi International Airport in Georgia bears the name of an aircraft engineer. There are politicians and heads of state commemorated around the world, from King Tribhuvan Bir Bikram Shah in Nepal to Bill and Hilary Clinton in Little Rock, Arkansas. Explorers like Tenzing Norgay, Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo get airports named after them and their spirit of adventure but if there were any spirits around George Best then they weren’t ones of adventure.
Perhaps every airport should be made to find someone to name themselves after. Manchester Noel Gallagher International Airport? Bristol Stephen Merchant Airport? Norwich Alan Partridge International? Are fictional people allowed? I suppose they must be, Doncaster Sheffield Airport was known as Robin Hood Airport for a while, so that must be okay. Why Robin Hood, though? I don’t know. It’s a fair old way from Sherwood Forest. Couldn’t they find anyone local? I’d have gone for local boy Brian Blessed and had huge pictures of him dressed as Prince Vultan from Flash Gordon with his massive wings, short shorts and chunky thighs. This is why I am not invited to meetings where decisions like this are made, perhaps I should just make up my own names for airports and hope they catch on.
Anyway, I seem to have rather lost my train of thought, there; I was flying home from Belfast City Airport. As it was Children in Need day they were doing their bit by getting a dumpy girl in a yellow onesie to sit glumly next to a bucket outside Boots. I love flying, I adore just being airborne, the amazing cloudscapes, the views of the earth from above. I pretty much hate commercial flying, though. One of the biggest problems is that they let just about anyone fly these days. The glamorous days when the men all wore suits and trilbies and the ladies were in furs have all gone. One of my favourite reminders of those days is that we still board the aircraft at gates. How long has it been since you simply walked through a gate in a low white picket fence and climbed the steps of your aeroplane?
The people that I reserve the most hatred for are those who consider themselves too important or too clever to listen as the cabin crew give their safety brief. It’s a legal requirement that they tell you these things. Actually, it’s a legal requirement that the captain tells you, but this is a busy time for aircraft captains and many don’t actually like passengers, so the cabin crew do it. If you are too ignorant to lift your eyes from your newspaper or stop your inane bloody conversation for ninety seconds while the crew give you information that might save your miserable, worthless life then I don’t care if you die. I will not deviate from following the floor-level lighting guiding me to my nearest exit just to help you because you don’t know about it.
If you’ve got your eyes closed and your earphones in during the safety brief, though, I will be going out of my way to block your exit and inflate your lifejacket, if you’ve managed to find it, before you leave the cabin. If we unexpectedly lose cabin pressure, I will be putting on my own mask before smiling smugly behind it at your blue, asphyxiated face because you need removing from the gene pool. Oh, and if you were the woman in seat 2C who was clearly sending text messages right under the nose of the cabin crew carrying out the safety briefing, once we’re in the freezing water of the Irish Sea, I’m coming for you and I’m going to steal your light and your whistle so they never find your stupid body. Text that.
I’m sorry, I didn’t sleep well last night, all those hippos. I’ll take a deep breath and look out of the window. Out past the docks that still look busy from up here, royal blue cranes with yellow booms and a big red-legged oil rig, in for refurbishment at Harland and Wolff. Those iconic yellow Samson and Goliath cranes with red wheels and the H & W in black on the cross-member. Then the city, hiding under low broken cloud, glimpses of the bridges and the verdigrised dome of the city hall mirrored by the larger glass dome of the Victoria Square shopping centre. The clouds part and I can see the harbour and the castle at Carrickfergus with the huge, white Tesco Extra behind it. I look out past the squat Blackhead Lighthouse and Scotland seems within touching distance.
We turn and climb away, out over the sea. The sky is now a clear, unending blue with just one cloudy trail from an airliner above us mirrored by the white feather behind a ship in the Irish Sea. Off the Cumbrian coast, the thousand white wave caps are like stars on the clearest of nights. The cloud shadow islands are echoed by the forested patches on the hillsides inland. I spend the whole flight back to Stansted with my nose pressed up against the window, watching the world go by, just as I did on that very first flight from Manchester to Heathrow as an eleven-year-old boy. The wonder of seeing the world from this viewpoint has never left me. I sing Rocket Man to myself; if you ever see me looking out of an aeroplane window, it’s fifty-fifty that this is what I’m doing. I try to track our route past Blackpool, Manchester, the Peak District, Derby, Peterborough, Cambridge. I can’t drag my eyes away. So, by the way, if I’ve got an aisle seat and you’ve got a window seat and you spend most of the flight asleep with the blind down, if we crash, I’m after you, too.