The other night, Tomas and I stopped at a chipper just off our street on the way home from the city centre. It was a Tuesday, approximately 8:30pm. Tomas was drunkety drunk drunk, having been drinking whiskey all day at the launch of the Belfast Film Festival. He and his friends have entered a film; it’s badly-dubbed Ulster Scotch soft-core porn. I shit you not. So by the time I got to the Duke of York after my group in the Westland, he was hammered, as were at least 5 other of his friends.

Anyway, his inability to say no to whiskey isn’t the point of the story. We stopped at the chipper, and ordered 2 fish and 1 chip. I wanted ketchup. He hates ketchup. So I said, just put ketchup on mine, thinking they would put it on the chip portion of my fish and chips. Now. Tomas knows that ketchup goes on chips. He also must’ve known that that’s not what was going to happen. Yet, in his drunken state, he said nothing. So when we got home and opened up our packages, my fish was on stop of my chips, sopping wet with ketchup. Ketchup. On FISH. The chips underneath were completely dry.

I don’t understand! Who in their right mind thinks that when someone asks for ketchup, they mean on their fish?! WHY WOULD I WANT THAT?! I was extremely upset. Not even so much that there was ketchup on my fish (it honestly pissed me off more that my chips were dry) but that I seemed to not know the rules in this place… Tomas acted like ‘of course they were gonna put it on your fish, what did you think?’ Like there was some kind of secret fish-and-sauce code that I hadn’t been given the key to. It’s really frustrating, even with small things like this, when you don’t understand what’s going on. Really, it’s the small things, the little understandings that make you feel like you belong to a place. This really made me feel like a totally ignorant outsider, in its own small seeming inconsequential way.

The next day, however, I got my first taste of what it’s like to be on the inside here. I went with Sean, my line manager, to meet our new HECUA intern, Ben. Sean brought me along since I had been a HECUA intern myself, obviously. So I asked Ben what they were doing, what stuff they had seen, to see if the program was still largely the same. It was so weird, hearing him talk about how they’d been to Derry, and how after our meeting they were going up the Shankill and the Falls to see the murals… it made me remember the time when I was a new HECUA student, the first time I had been to Belfast, how I (and everyone else on the program) had been fascinated by the conflict and its everyday manifestations, and had it on our minds everytime we talked to any one from here. Now I was looking at it with much different eyes, and it was odd to hear him talk about these things that were relatively normal (though obviously not as normal for me as for people who grew up here) and a part of daily life as if they were something to be discovered in a morbidly fascinating museum exhibition.

I mentioned this to Sean after we left Ben, and he said that it was of course different for me now that I was living here - Ben was on the outside looking in, whereas I was now more on the inside, looking out.

I realized that he was right, and it was the first time I’d felt that way since being here.

Still pissed about the damn ketchup, though. Wankers.