The Skagerrak, which is a body of water between Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, contains among other things mackerel, herring, and cod. It is also a pleasant word to say aloud — three syllables, the second stressed, the double-k at the end like the sound of a small boat touching a dock. One thinks of it this week because Belfast, by contrast, is two syllables, both of them flat, and has been appearing in headlines next to words like "riot" and "fire" and "water cannon" 1518 with a frequency that makes the name itself start to sound like breaking glass.
“There is something almost indecent about a place name that is allowed to sit quietly and mean only itself.”
Place names do this. They collect associations the way a ship's hull collects barnacles. For a few days, "Belfast" has meant burning vehicles and masked men and a Sudanese asylum seeker charged with attempted murder 1520. Before that it meant other things. The city has had several tenures as a word. What is striking this week is how many other place names have been recruited to stand next to it in the same sentences: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ayr 27, Southampton 30, even the Sandyknowes roundabout 25, which is not so much a place as a piece of infrastructure that has had petrol bombs thrown at it and has therefore earned a mention in the BBC live blog.
The Skagerrak, by contrast, remains a body of water containing mackerel. It does not appear in any of the coverage of the Belfast unrest, which is precisely why one thinks of it. There is something almost indecent about a place name that is allowed to sit quietly and mean only itself. The mackerel do not know they are lucky.
One notices, too, that the coverage keeps returning to the question of where the man charged with attempted murder came from — Sudan, we are told 1320, as if the word "Sudan" could be made to do some of the explanatory work that the facts of the case are not yet doing. Sudan is a country of 48 million people and contains Khartoum, the White Nile, the Nubian pyramids, and a civil war that has displaced millions. In the coverage it becomes a two-syllable explanation for violence in a city 4,000 miles away. Place names are asked to carry a great deal.
The last line of the Notebook is meant to be a bow, not a punchline, so here it is: the Skagerrak is 240 kilometres long, up to 700 metres deep, and named from the Old Norse for "the jutting peninsula." It contains mackerel. One sets down one's teacup.