The fish-and-chips van near the shops in the Cregagh estate did brisk business on the frozen, soaking Friday evening when they brought George Best home. Belfast, on a cold and wet December day, gave itself to Georgre Best, writes Keith Duggan.
A man from Sky television had marshalled a few children wearing Manchester United shirts under damp parka jackets and carrying bright red Belfast Telegraph newspaper bags to stand in the background while the cameraman sought an evocative shot to portray the simple origins of a popular hero.
"Try to look natural, lads," he advised.
The boys played their part to perfection as a lone camera bulb lit up the place of George Best's boyhood, stunning in its ordinariness. Life's chores and habits did not completely stop because the Cregagh's darling boy had returned under sombre skies and floral wreaths, bearing love notes from around the world.
They bantered as usual in McElwhinney's butchers, had a smoke under the awning of Hamilton's newsagents and stood in the lovely brightness of the chip van counter while freshly battered cod sizzled.
High above the cheerful terrace of shop lights, a sheet was draped from the 12th storey of Cregagh's high-rise flats, ghostly in the black evening. It was inscribed with what has become the popular epitaph for Belfast's most beloved son: George Best. Genius. 1946-2005.
Far below that proclamation, the TV cameraman moved into film the interior of the chip van and the cook, wearing a white paper hat and T-shirt, stooped down as though to take an order.
They asked him about Best and, of course, he gave the natural answer, the one that has been spoken a thousand times. He Was One Of Ours. Then the children, young enough to know only peacetime Belfast, spoke politely about their feelings for Best, whose mid-20th century boyhood was so distant the Troubles had not yet flared.
These youngsters were not fazed by this television interview, though. This was George Best, after all - and this was Belfast. It brought to mind the apocryphal tale dating back to the worst violence of the 1970s when a tiny street urchin approached an astonished BBC film crew and casually asked: "Are yez lookin' for a soundbite?"
Belfast, for all its of forlorn red- brick grandeur and deep- rooted sense of Ulster-Scots reserve, has always held a fascination for the wider world. From the ill-fated launch of the Titanic through the long, stifling summer of the hunger strikes, Belfast is a city that has always been associated with tragedy on a grand and unforgettable scale.
For decades, it was a sad, broken place made tolerable by a fiercely warm sense of humour. In the past 10 years, the sharp edges of religious and cultural hatreds may have softened but have not fully disappeared.
So the death of George Best presented Belfast with a radical proposition. The city is long accustomed to public expressions of heartbreak and sorrow and there were elements of both in the last journey of the 1960s soccer god. But his homecoming was tied to a widespread outpouring of love and sentiment and remembrance. Belfast was not sure how it would handle such emotions.
It would involve a mass movement which, remarkably for Belfast, transcended politics and had nothing to do with religious beliefs. Best's life was an embodiment of a quality often so elusive and unfathomable in his native city: joy.
When Best was the beautiful prince of England's soccer stadiums, he touched strangers in a profound and permanent way. For whatever reason, many generations of people saw in him an absolute innocence that, along with his physical beauty and joyous sense of adventure with a football, made them adore him, hopelessly and unashamedly.
Despite the sadness of Best's post-football life, those drink- sodden years of pathos and boredom and the attendant struggles of a middle-aged man in the throes of a terrible disease, those many thousands chose to remember him as he was when young and untouchable. When his talent and fame were new and audacious, the dark-eyed lad from Belfast seemed to have mastered the most common fantasy of boyhood. It was that very simple notion, so luminous and captivating and so far removed from the darkness that has shrouded countless Belfast funerals, that brought a change over the city this weekend.
"This is part of Northern Ireland's history now," said Malcolm Brodie over a pot of tea as the rain swept in from the Mournes on Friday morning.
"It is ironic that the final part of George's story is being played out on such a political stage. Here he is, this humble kid from a sprawling Belfast housing estate whose father was a ship worker, and here he is, after attaining world acclaim as a footballer and also on occasion total indignation from people who felt he was destroying his life.
"Here he is, the quiet boy from Belfast lying virtually in state like a president in the rotunda in Washington. So sad. But it has been a tremendous journey."
Brodie, the celebrated soccer writer with the Telegraph, has been a follower and friend of Best since his first presages of natural brilliance. He remembers meeting George's parents, Dickie and Annie, in 16 Burren Way just as their eldest boy was preparing to leave for Manchester.
"I do remember Ann telling me it was a very difficult birth up in hospital and George was so frail that people didn't believe he would ever survive . . .
"At that time she didn't think he would ever be a footballer because he was so slight, but she did produce that famous photograph for me taken when he was an 18-month-old child dribbling a football and you could see then that he had this tremendous balance.
"That doesn't seem so long ago and I can't fully realise that never again will I be ringing him up or following some part of his football story. I can't believe I will never speak again to George Best."
That was the common sentiment across Belfast all weekend. It was at once an international and intensely local commemoration and while the barriers were laid the whole way out to the intimidating and magnificent edifice of Stormont, many visitors found themselves wandering the modest red brick streets of the Cregagh. Imagining.
Although the blinds were drawn down in 16 Burren Way, mourners were free to pay their respects and leave floral tributes and scarves and football jerseys and written messages in the tiny front lawn. Burren Way was built after the second World War, its name borrowed, like those of the neighbouring streets, from the Mourne Mountains.
It was fundamentally Protestant working-class, modest and proud and respectable.
Among those paying their respects in the rain on Friday evening was a man named Doyler who grew up on Trassy Close and was the same age as Best. In that unconscious way of boyhood, they were firm friends for a couple of years and then rarely saw one another.
He spoke of this slight youngster, too gaunt to be considered truly good-looking then, as just another child on the street. He pointed out two lines in the concrete slabs on the road outside the Best home where they would play heading games in the evening. Doyler was a goalkeeper, good enough to get a trial with Everton but not to stay.
"Hands were too small. I couldn't grip the ball in one palm."
He recalled how George consoled him on the evening of the Munich disaster by putting his arm around his shoulder and said: "Sure don't worry, we'll play for them."
He told this story about how a cup was "borrowed" from the mantelpiece in Gurty Bailey's house for a street tournament. Trassy Close won the game and the cup was inevitably broken, leaving Doyler to take it home in dismay to his father. His Dad managed to patch it up with a matchstick and chewing gum.
The next afternoon, Burren Way challenged for another game and, led by George Best and a youngster named Dan Montgomery, they won 4-0.
"My Dad asked who the captain was and George was shouting to be called up," Doyler said, "but my Dad picked this heavier child and he was carried shoulder high with the damaged cup. And of course, the kids dropped him and the cup fell and got broken - for the first time. So we got away with it."
Doyler never met George after he left the Cregagh and watched as his marvellous public life took flight in the fabled stadiums across the water. Like most Belfast folk, he was proud, astonished, amused, saddened and angered by the triumph and turmoil that followed George down all the years.
Best's flamboyance and artistic expression was so compelling and entertaining that it seemed to fly in the face of the prevailing values of modesty and humility that governed the Cregagh estate. That Burren Way could produce such an outrageous, brilliant talent seemed like a miracle - and yet the place never left him.
"Ach, I didn't really know George," said David Davidson, who lives two doors down on Burren Way. Like most neighbours, he stood outside his front door early on Saturday morning, shivering in a white shirt and black tie.
"But I felt like he was a brother. Over the years you'd look out the window and you'd do a double take because George Best would walk by. I kicked a football with Calum once or twice when we were children and I'd know his Da, Mr Best, very well, and he's a great man, Mr Best. George made everyone around here very proud. You see all the stuff on television about him now and it's just very sad, it's hard to believe."
On Saturday morning, the skies brightened briefly before darkening with finality and covering Belfast in soft, relentless rain.
The farewell to George Best would carry all the trappings of a state ceremony. Through the grief and poignancy and nostalgia of the past week, reservations were voiced that the attention paid to the passing of a long-retired football player, however sublime, was excessive and sentimental.
It was something more substantial than nostalgia that compelled 100,000 people from Belfast and across the North, from all counties "down South" and from England and Europe to stand and honour Best's funeral cortege on a dismal December morning.
That Stormont should be chosen as the place of repose for the funeral ceremony of a footballer, however beloved, was exceptional and unprecedented - but Belfast is an exceptional city.
The sight of the long black hearse, strewn with flowers and bearing the floral inscription Legend, crawling towards the North's great monument to politics, seemed apt.
The great towering likeness of Edward Carson, his fist raised in formidable defiance, was like an austere premonition of one of Best's famous goal scoring poses, his hair gloriously unkempt, face smiling beautiful and the hand raised in easy triumph, as though he had no care in the world.
It was that George Best, the invincible winner, the smiling trickster, who made the sons and daughters of hard, proud Belfast go teary-eyed on Saturday.
Best had said he just hoped people would remember the football. That will come. In the Great Hall at Stormont, though, the gilded and famous and - in honour of Dickie Best's request - some members of the ordinary public, remembered a life, vivid but far from perfect.
With the perfect rendition of classic ballads, the sounds of a lone piper and the moving eulogies from Denis Law, George's sister Barbara and his only child Calum, it was bound to be an emotional service. But it remained dignified.
Through it all, Dickie Best sat reserved and silent. There was the sense that after burying his famous son out at Roselawn cemetery where his wife Annie lay, he wanted only to return to the peace of Burren Way to grieve and reminisce privately.
He would be among his own there. Most of the Cregagh folk did not go out to Stormont, instead, they stood outside their houses early on Saturday morning waiting until the men from Brown and Sons carried wee Georgie out on to the street.
For a few moments, there was absolute silence and then as the cortege moved forward, the applause began. Soon it would fill all of Belfast, but for that moment, George Best's neighbours clapped as if their wee darling boy was starting out all over again, a football - and the world - at his feet.