New Year's Day, Belfast

New Year’s Day is usually a free day for me and I had a very deeply satisfying one this time round. The family celebrations of Christmas were over and the obligations towards a variety of distant relatives and clients had been fulfilled and I was able to waken into a crisp, work-free, duty-free Belfast Sunday morning, the first of a brand new year.

By 8 o’clock I’d had my customary freezing cold shower and pulled on the as yet unworn socks, shirt, pullover and whatever else that had come my way at Christmas. By 9 o’clock the kitchen was restored to some semblance of order and cleanliness, and by 9.30 I was sitting in my preferred coffee house with Hemingway and a steaming mug of Earl Grey tea.

The cafes in South Belfast are generally empty on New Year’s Day unlike every other day of the year, although that hardly comes as much of a surprise. At different times of the day they teem with business people, shoppers, ladies who lunch and others ladies with screaming children; at all times they teem with students. Today, however, my preferred coffee house was empty, with plenty of room for me and Hemingway.

Mercifully this particular cafe, Michael’s, never plays music appropriate to the season, but it usually manages to play something appropriate to my mood, something mellow, languid, far away, and I especially appreciate hearing background music that is unfamiliar, something that I’ve never heard before and will probably never hear again. There are of course times when it’s good to sit and read with no music except for the clink of cups on saucers and the pleasant ting of a teaspoon.

Today the atmosphere at Michael’s was perfect. The rain was falling in an unhurried kind of way beyond the long windows it was washing over, and the winter-naked trees on the pavement reached into the grey sky with no wind to move them. Beyond the trees my mind drifted into the hospital that lifts squattly above the surrounding shops and houses, a building full of people who were either recovering from or succumbing to one illness or another.

Back inside Michael’s the air was warm and coffee-laden and breathing it was like breathing espresso shots and I remembered I had company and turned back to Hemingway and listened to him telling me stories from his hunting trip in Africa. I abhor big game hunting of course. Hemingway’s attitude to shooting animals for thrills sickens me but I let him talk on and excused him as a man of his time, primitive in a 1930s kind of way. It was his passion and story-telling that captivated me as they always do when we meet up.

Hemingway transported me. As he talked and drank I could just about taste the African bush I grew up in. When he told me about the rains falling in the night on his tent the smell that is now long-lost to me of the sweet African earth came rushing into the cafe and I could picture tens of thousands of flying ants heading out of their nest in the deep, damp earth in a dense column of wings towards the big cold moon that had sailed sedately into a black sky, ancient and young at the same time.

For a moment I was back in Africa. Then the door opened and a cool draught crept in. Hemingway dissolved into the grainy dregs left in the bottom of his coffee cup, and wrapped up in my coat and scarf I wondered out of Michael’s Coffee House onto the cold, wet, empty streets of Belfast to throw myself into whatever another new year might bring.