Holywood swinging still
Here I am, back in Northern Ireland, in the town slash Belfast suburb of Holywood. I’m blogging on my notebook outside The Coffee Yard, Holywood’s hottest coffee shop, which is making me feel quite ridiculously C21. It’s a long way from Elda’s Colombian Coffee Shop where I usually spend my mornings. Holywood is the nearest I’ve found in Northern Ireland to a hippy town, in that it has an anthroposophical organic shop and two crystal outlets; but this is NI, so it is also as unlike any other hippy town (Totnes, for example) as is imaginable. It’s full of lawyers and doctors, and, of course, churches. There are Porsches and Quattroportes parked along the High Street, and a superfluity of designer interior places.
It does have an excellent if small secondhand bookshop, where I copped a hardback copy of ‘Uncle and his Detective’ by JP Martin, in the original Quentin Blake dustwrapper for six quid yesterday. The only copy anywhere on the interweb is currently a ton, so I was made up.
And now I’m off to sample one of the undoubted delights of NI culture; an old fashioned barbers shop, which are to be found everywhere. For a cosmetic hair skim, you understand, rather than what most people would see as a ‘haircut’.
I was in Portrush last week – it now has an ‘aura photography and crystals’ shop.
Jasus Ian, but you’re such a globetrotter and all. I am delighted with the concept of a cosmetic hair sim. I once had a haircut in an old fashioned barbers in Lymington. During the course of the haircut, the old fashioned barber revealed that he’d been stationed in Newhaven during the war. Like a fool I told him that was where I came from. The haircut I received was obviously his revenge for a shit billet during a shit war. I never went to Lymington for a haircut again. As it was I only had that one by accident; things could have turned out so differently. I could have wandered into a while-you-wait testectomy shop just as easily. And with a similar result. You know how these things happen.