That special season that exists only in Ulster

We set off on a whim, with no specific plan of things to do apart from one: to enjoy the cool air. More and more Mediterranean souls – myself included – are booking a little summer trip driven by a new desire, a desire that wasn’t on the radar for August holidays until quite recently: I don’t want to have to stay in air-conditioned rooms. We’ve spent two months like codfish; enough is enough. If you can’t bring yourself to head for the mountains, your summer destinations in future will be up north. Oceans, cool breezes, cotton-wool skies. There’s no room for melancholy; even the most sensitive souls find that any weather-related gloom is dispelled by having a nice jumper packed in their suitcase. A coolness that feels like new life.

Northern Ireland.

Belfast. A city that seems friendly, with smiling young people. English spoken at double speed: anyone who already struggles to understand it (like me) won’t understand a thing here. You smile like a slightly slow-witted European cousin and they take a liking to you. Red-brick houses. Young people are out and about; it’s Saturday. Some are punks with studs scattered across their eyebrows and in their noses; others have blue hair and orange tights – a real blast from the 90s. There are record shops like the ones in Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity”; the alphabetical labels with the bands’ names are carefully written in marker pen. Shops selling old war memorabilia, whisky shops, different types of beer. Italian restaurants, though there are more of the big industrial coffee chains. In the evenings, people play music and sing in the pubs. A walk to see the encyclopaedia of murals: the distant past, then the not-so-distant past, the IRA, and then those of the recent past, Israel and Palestine. The old and new parts of the city are intermingled; the old isn’t that old and the new isn’t all that new. A calm atmosphere in a city that isn’t calm. The people are friendly, not like the English. The past few weeks have been turbulent, they say; the rioters went from house to house looking for immigrants. There are often syringes on the pavements. Little time to think about understanding even a little bit of Belfast – just as well; who do tourists think they are, anyway, wanting to understand anything? Shopping centres. More shopping centres. I looked for the old linen shops, but they’re all closed.

We’re heading north, towards the ocean. The grey turns to white, Union Jacks are flying, small houses dotted here and there, and countryside, countryside. More green countryside. ‘New potatoes for sale’, says the sign, but there’s no one to be seen where there ought to be a farm. You can see the golf courses. Six-star resorts with Americans who stay for a week. They never leave the lodge. They play, eat and head off to the airport.

Shades of green. Pale green, bright green and very bright green. Psychedelic green, summer and spring green, fir green, seaweed green. The meadows are their skies; green is the colour that sets the mood for a gentle sense of cheerfulness. You don’t look up – because the grey offers little to see – here you look down at the ground. In the meadows, the flocks have coloured backs and graze: one flock is tinged with fuchsia on the neck, another with purple and yellow, and so on. Is it so as not to confuse them, should they get lost or mingle with another flock? A lost sheep does not get lost in Northern Ireland. Cows, on the other hand, do not have coloured tattoos. Perhaps cows do not venture out.

Small villages along the coast. Pointed, pastel-coloured cottages; ice-cream vans; shops with aluminium shelves selling children’s sand spades, buckets and loose sweets. Yet people are still wearing woollen jumpers and waterproof jackets, so the seaside village seems like a summer pantomime. It’s not summer, anywhere. But it’s not autumn, winter or spring either. It’s another season; they only have it here.

A walk along the sand spit at Portstewart, a Victorian seaside resort, according to the guidebook. Patches of black, cracked rock – perhaps this is where Poseidon set the sea alight, and those are the embers. On the coast, one gains a better understanding of the story of Irish grass. It’s not so much about the colour as it is about its resilience. It’s grass that grows on basalt walls, grass that, in the absence of sunshine, learns to thrive in the ice. In Ireland, sunshine is doled out by the gram. The grass grows beneath the sea; I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It’s iron grass – absolutely beautiful.