LAST Friday I was walking up University Road with the poet Miriam Gamble on the way to a book launch in the Great Hall at Queen’s. She’s been living in Edinburgh for the last decade and a half, give or take a year or two, and even though I see her quite often in Belfast we couldn’t help but point out the places that have changed in recent years.
Miriam pointed out that what is now a Tesco Express had been The Scream bar when she was a student: a chain of student bars named after the Edvard Munch painting of that name. We walked past the scaffolding of what’s been announced as the new Seamus Heaney Centre just past Mount Charles. I don’t think either of us noticed Blaze and Glaze (the burned-out shell of the former barbecue restaurant that no longer has any windows).
As we crossed at the traffic lights on the corner of University Street and University Road I said that I guessed she hadn’t seen what was coming up on our right: Bookfinders Café, which closed five years ago after four decades in business, had been bought over by developers, repointed, and opened again as a Caffè Nero.
I was first in Bookfinders as a teenager and became a regular for the best part of a decade and a half. I’m one in a huge crowd of regulars, the vast majority of them much more accomplished than me. I remember sitting quietly eating vegetable soup and listening in on a conversation between Glenn Patterson and Colin Carberry as they talked about the screenplay they were writing for the Good Vibrations film.
I remember doing the same when Leontia Flynn was talking about writing what was (before a name change) the long title poem of her 2011 book ‘Profit and Loss’. Ciaran Carson was a regular. Derek Mahon spent an afternoon in 2007 hiding in the kitchen to avoid a bus trip to Carrowdore as part of a conference on Louis MacNeice. Further back, and maybe apocryphally, Padraic Fiacc would read tea leaves in exchange for a few quid for whiskey.
In its final years, Bookfinders became the place that another generation of writers would gather (most afternoons) to talk and drink wine (most afternoons) around closing time when Mary Denvir, the owner, would place some chairs at the threshold between the bookshop and café and declare to any remaining customers that she was holding a ‘business meeting’.
I’m sure someone will write about it properly at some point, but off the top of my head: Michael Magee thanks Mary in the acknowledgements of ‘Close to Home’ (as well as using the café as a setting), her name turns up in the acknowledgements, ‘Isdal’ by Susannah Dickey, ‘If All the World and Love Were Young’ by Stephen Sexton and many more books. I’d bet that she’ll be thanked in Scott McKendry’s new book ‘Gub’, too.
In January I had a string of missed calls from Mary and feared that something bad had happened. When I called back she was business-like: "Stephen, I was thinking and I think you should invite Bob Dylan to the festival you’re organising. You know, you could make the most of the poetry from here and that sort of thing." She was serious. "Why not, honeybee? Well, I just think you should try."
She called again yesterday. She asked a litany of questions about her final regulars: "How did your festival go? And how is Manuela, did her gig go well in Galway? And how’s Micky? Good, glad to hear it. And Tara? She’s got the job in London with Faber now, yes? And do you see much of Padraig? Oh good."
As for Mary herself: "I’m grand, you know, I’m not getting any younger, but I’ve got the dog and I walk her for an hour and a half every day." She finished: "Send my love to everyone, won’t you, honeybee?"
Yes, I said, and that’s what I’m doing.
