Sparkle and Spotlights

“I’ll tell you what it is. It’s Bruce. He’s lost his sparkle.”

As the two, fortysomething blondes swam slowly across the hotel pool, talking quickly in flat Humberside accents, I assumed they were referring to the previous week’s Strictly Come Dancing. So much so, in fact, that I almost joined in: “Yes, I know just what you mean. It’s still quite good Saturday night TV, but – yes, it’s Bruce, he’s just not the same. He has somehow – it’s just as you say, he’s lost his sparkle.” But then the conversation moved on and I realised that they weren’t talking about Bruce Forsyth at all. They were talking about one of their husbands – husbands still fast asleep upstairs in adjoining bedrooms, while the sisters swam and talked. Bruce had looked tired last night. He’d gone to bed early. He was selfish, when it came down to it. This was their holiday, for heaven’s sake. Whatever was behind it, and it was all very suspicious if you asked his sister-in-law: Bruce had lost his sparkle.

It’s like that, though, isn’t it. You accidentally overhear a snippet of conversation and immediately you reach a conclusion about what the people beside you are talking about. What you assume will probably come somewhere under the heading of common ground. So when I heard the two women discussing somebody called Bruce that Sunday morning, I immediately thought in word associations: Bruce – Bruce Forsyth – Strictly Come Dancing – glitter – not as good as it used to be - lost sparkle. But then you hear something else, and you realise that you were wrong all along. That these are people you don’t know, and with whom you probably have very little in common. Strangers, with different lives to yours. These last few days have been all about seeing things from a completely new angle. It wasn’t just that conversation between the swimming sisters – women so alike, incidentally, that they even mirrored one another’s movements in perfect and effortless synchronisation as they reclined on the poolside loungers, climbed into the pool, swam, rested, swam again, climbed out and decamped to the Jacuzzi. It was much more than a misunderstood fragment of someone else’s life.

It started with a ride on the Belfast Big Wheel. In typical Northern Irish fashion, this latest addition to the Belfast landscape has been rubbished and ridiculed and queued for. Everyone wants to call it an eyesore, but no-one wants to miss out on a trip on it. Within a week of its arrival, it’s become the butt of jokes by local comedians and the possibility of it never catching on has been widely discussed. It’s been given nicknames, typically enough: The Belfast Aye and The Belfast Birl being two I’ve heard so far. Like the long queue of people in front of and behind me, I decided that it was about time I saw my native city from a different angle. I set aside the fear of heights which had kept me off the London Eye on my last visit, and joined the snaking queue… and really, apart from a few moments of tension when the light breeze rocked the pod a bit when we were the full 60 metres up, I was quite pleased that I wasn’t scared at all. A fear faced, and all that. I’d heard complaints that the problem was once you went up, there really wasn’t all that much to see – just Belfast Lough and the Harland and Wolff cranes, and Stormont, and Cave Hill – nothing compared to London, where there were just so many landmarks to watch out for. The thing is, though – this is Belfast, not London, and you can’t really expect extra special landmarks just to add themselves to the map like some sort of interactive, pop-up tourist experience, just for the sake of the view. What I saw from the top of the Big Wheel was just Belfast, itself – on a fine autumn morning, with the richness of colour still in the trees, and a light mist of cloud here and there. There were no palaces or other great historical sites – but to expect these would be to miss the point. It would be like saying that anyone who didn’t quite match up to the statistics and grooming of the catwalk models taking part in yesterday’s Belfast Fashion Week events was just not good enough at all. We might aspire to look as good as we can, but we can’t all be models; Belfast will never have the impact of London, but that perhaps reinforces, rather than removing, any credibility it might have. As the Big Wheel went up and around, the city gradually spread itself out under my feet. I was able to identify places I’d known all my life from a whole other angle. Just as, after the event, we can sometimes suddenly see what people really meant when they spoke to us, from 60 metres up, and years after I moved away from the city, I could see the elements of Belfast as they interlinked and related to one another. It was the real-life equivalent of the mini town I had in the form of a bedside rug when I was a child. I remember arranging my matchbox cars meticulously along its streets: one outside each little grey square house, and closing my eyes and imagining the people who lived in each house and drove each car. From the Wheel, instead of imagining it all, I was able to remember living out there and going to school over here and getting the bus in that direction and going through the old security barriers back then to get to the shops straight below where I was right now.

My airborne journey punctuated the morning; in the afternoon I found another new way of viewing (and hearing) things when I attended a very unique event – a concert in the Grand Opera House by another Belfast phenomenon: Duke Special. I’d been looking forward to this since the day on which the tickets went on sale, complete with the occasional gentle reprimand at how loudly I was playing the appropriate album in anticipation: “You do know, don’t you, that the neighbours are all dancing in our garden?” Reading reviews of the Duke’s many earlier concerts, and knowing all the songs by heart, though, didn’t really prepare me for the impact of the live performance itself. First of all there was the sheer immediacy of hearing the songs I’d listened to so often on my iPod and my stereo, performed right there, live, just a few metres away from me. There was the atmosphere of complete quiet when the more sombre or emotional songs were played, juxtaposed with the exuberance of the audience singalongs which seem to characterise Duke Special concerts. The light and shade of the music was perfectly reflected in the light and shade of the stage lights. In the quiet moments, the theatre was dark, with just a single spotlight illuminating the almost ethereal, dreadlocked figure at the piano, alone on-stage. Then the lights brightened with a chorus-line of interlocking colours at the back, the full band seemed to materialise with the magic of the coloured lights, and the enthralled audience was dappled with rotating spots of undulating purple and blue. The songs I’d listened to – the lyrics I’d thought about, the chord patterns I knew by heart and by fingertip – were suddenly something quite different. The universality of the themes of joy and despair, love and loss, doing wrong and being sorry, in the live performance became far more than just one man’s communication of a few things that have happened in his life. The songs, performed to a packed theatre of music lovers on the edge of their seats, became a sharing of the memory of all these things for all these people: joy and despair, love and loss, doing wrong and being sorry. Yes: the musicians on stage were all incredibly talented – even more so than I’d ever realised, in fact; but the experience of the concert was even more than this – it was the best possible example of that moment in the theatre when you feel the little hairs on the back of your neck shiver and stand up… and you somehow know that the same thing has just happened, right then, to the hundreds of people around you.

Outside the City Hall in Belfast, the white structures of the Big Wheel are in counterpoint with the officeblocks and department stores and with the distinctive Victorian architecture of the City Hall itself. Their lines cross each other in a geometry of old and new – a mathematics of moving and static parts. From the top of the Wheel, the city becomes a jigsaw with every piece where it should be. It may not be the most imaginative or picturesque jigsaw ever made, but its surface is smoothed in its pattern of interlocking pieces. This sense of rightness is a balance we can find in music too, just as in a landscape: in the moment when the accuracy of note and chord and just the right set of lyrics is simultaneously achieved and transcended in the shared experience of emotion and experience, and the jigsaw of music completes itself.

And what about Bruce?

Sometimes, I know far too well how he feels. Sparkle seems much too far away – distant, unattainable. Sometimes it feels as if all the little pieces with their uneven edges and their fragmented images of an imagined entirety could never be set alongside one another in any meaningful way. But sometimes things just suddenly make sense. Just when we least expect it. Just when the words make sense, or the perspective changes, or the shapes around you align, or when the bass-line and your heartbeat coincide.

Originally written: 04-11-07