The lanes were silent
There was nothing, no one, nothing around for miles
I doused our friendly venture
With a hard-faced
Three-word gesture
The thing about people from the six counties that make up the political entity of Northern Ireland is that, in reality, they aren’t totally British. And for balance of us’uns and them’uns they are in no way Irish either. The amount of subtle differences between what either side clings to as their ‘heritage’ and their actual every-day situation total up to something different than they think.
I guess I have always known this, and always considered it somewhat odd. Not in the ‘we have more in common than we have different’, nor in ‘we are more alike than either of those who we want to cleave to’ summation of differences. It is more invidious than that. And embarassing for both sides.
I started something
I forced you to a zone
And you were clearly
Never meant to go
Hair brushed and parted
Typical me, typical me
Typical me
I started something
…And now I’m not too sure
What brings this on is I have recently been back to the place that formed me. But even before that, while waiting in the airport (having fought, as per usual, the pointless security theatre they put on at Stansted) Κασσάνδρα said to me ‘even though you deride it, and try to avoid it, you really are nothing more than a grumpy Ulsterman yourself.’
Which…cut me. I am not like those intransigent halfwits with their blinkered outlook, that blinkered outlook stuck somewhere in the 1800s, fearing not only change, but difference, strangers and time. But I can’t escape some of it, for sure, even if the harsher edges of my accent have been smoothed. A little. (I might take the ideas I really wanted for this post and turn them into a…pamphlet essay. And put on an angry sweater and rail against the injustices and ignorances…but not here. Not now.)
I grabbed you by the guilded beams
Uh, that’s what tradition means
And I doused another venture
With a gesture
That was … absolutely vile
The very air is different, not better, nor worse, just different. But the people, they are a breed apart. When you get told they are welcoming, that is true, in as much as folk will always say hello, nod and engage in a wee chat while standing in some queue, any queue. But underneath all that, there is a streak of bitterness, in all generations.
And the self-aggrandising, coupled with lies.
For years, all my life in fact, we were told Northern Ireland was the intellectual cream of the UK (which now makes me laugh, and shows how easily people, myself included, are fooled), and that, despite our Troubles, we were better educated than those poor chumps across the water. And it turns out this is nonsense. One of those lines we were fed, with no citation. Having checked on it, it turns out the best (grammar) schools in NI were always being compared to the (very worst inner city) comprehensive in England. And this is still happening. At best it was putting a good light on statistics, at worst, blatantly lying. Even though there are more schools in Northern Ireland, with smaller class sizes, which is something England strives for. (Look, you can prove it the other way by statistics if you slice and dice them, but if you are having to do that, then it isn’t intrinsically true. Whatever that means.)
Of course, if we were better educated, maybe we’d have stopped fighting with each other. But after 800 years of that, it is somewhat of a habit now.
I started something
I forced you to a zone
And you were clearly
Never meant to go
Hair brushed and parted
Typical me, typical me
Typical me
I started something
…And now I’m not too sure
Not that I have gone native over here in the land of the invader, it is, alas, sadder than that. Now I don’t really fit anywhere. (Not that I ever did, particularly, but loss of…roots, or my discarding of them, has hit me whereas it never did before.) I can see the very small sideways differences. Not that it makes home a foreign place, but it is no longer…home. Home is where the heart is, more, home is where the hearth is, home is where I am, and where I feel at home. I live in England, but my home is with my family. I know where I come from, and it now looks and feels strange to me.
Gerry Adams once said that the dole queues in Ballymena were as long as the dole queues in Ballymurphy. But that doesn’t mean Ballymena is Finchley, nor Ballymurphy is Tallaght. In conversation about politics, specifically the politics of the North, neither the Finchley set nor the Tallaght set get the nuances we grew up with.
I grabbed you by the guilded beams
Uh, that’s what tradition means
And now eighteen months’ hard labour
Seems … fair enough
What does that mean I have lost? I am not sure. I (mostly) enjoyed my last trip back, but it was seen through the eyes of a tourist. I am well aware it is me, not it, that has been altered.
I also attended a service from the church of my youth, too, and all I could think of was one of the final sequences in À la recherche du temps perdu where the author is at (yet another) society party, and looking around him, is in despair. What I am doing here with all these…elderly people? Where is the youthful and attractive Duchess, the languid and liquid Duc? How did I get in this room? And how come people are referring to me as ‘sir’, I am their contemporary, am I not? And who is that old man in the mirror impersonating me? (Actually, I can apply Proust to any situation, such is his absolute genius.)
But again, that brings it back to me seeing it all almost anew. Time, and place, regained.
I started something
And I forced you to a zone
And you were clearly
Never meant to go
Hair brushed and parted
Typical me, typical me
Typical me
I started something
And now I’m not too sure
Am I worried about something I have lost? Not really, for everything changes, ends and starts again. I am still not comfortable in my skin, but I am getting there. The world says, give a little bit, give a little bit of your love to me.
All I ever wanted was to look at the sky, read and be with my family. To share, learn and be.
I started something
I started something
Typical me, typical me
Typical me, typical me
Typical me, typical me
Typical me
I started something
And now I’m not too sure
