He didn’t even give me 24 hours. Within minutes of landing in Belfast, as I strained to decipher his parents’ accents from the backseat of the car (it always takes my ears a while to attune, as it does during the first act of a Shakespeare play), my boyfriend was looking at me pointedly. See, his eyes seemed to say, isn’t it lovely here. As we watched huge waves crash over Ballintoy Harbour, part of the obligatory Game of Thrones tour; see, isn’t it beautiful. As the pet donkeys nudged at me for another slice of bread; see, don’t you want to move here?
The first two, I could concede. But the last – no matter how I turned that particular puzzle piece, I couldn’t make it fit. You see, I’m a Londoner – ish. I was born in zone six, in Kingston upon Thames, a suburb that was reclassified as a borough of Greater London in 1965. I armed myself with this fact early in my teenage years, to defend against the inevitable “but isn’t that in Surrey?” question.
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