At times, Northern Ireland reminds me – quite a lot – of parts of America. It’s not about ten-gallon hats, or a propensity for enormous pickup trucks – although the region probably has its share, but once you get out of the urban sprawls, and motorways with insane numbers of lanes (America again), it’s the way the space is used. Whether it’s true in actuality or not, there’s a feeling that there has always been plenty of room to go around. Aeons past, settlers didn’t feel the need to bunch up. There’s an air of sprawling, of stretching, of mankind’s presence extending longer, thinner tendrils here than in other parts of the UK. As you travel through Northern Ireland, you get a sense that villages start more gradually, urbanisation increases in density more slowly, and then you reach a nebulous centre before leaving the buildings languidly behind, as if they’re reluctant to let you go.
Where am I?