What a bunch of utter spasticulated loser retard rejects you sad bastards are
Straight from Collett's or Woods - Jambo the hammerhead strikes again.
Oh yeah, I've run into one or two of those. Mythologising themselves for staying in Ireland as if they were some kind of patriots for doing so when in the majority of cases they wouldn't last five minutes past a holiday abroad.
I love the Irish strain who genuinely think that two weeks on some sun-soaked Spanish or Greek island is 'travel'. I've a few relatives who bang on like that and there's nothing worse than being cornered by them wanting to tell you all about their 'great adventure' abroad. Eating fish and chips, drinking Watney's Red Barrel and dancing to techno music until six in the morning.
The burned red skin of sleeping off the hangover on some sandy beach lotioned up in sun-block and the jaw hanging wide open with drool running down the air-bed into the sand. Surrounded by cockney accents and languages they can't even recognize, let alone interpret.
It's hard to take seriously, so I don't bother trying any more - I just let them rabbit on and wait my turn to speak, which is often demoted to just a brief 'yeah, great - seeya later'.
Yet the same Irish abroad? Do they also ham it up? Hell, yeah! There's nothing funnier than eavesdropping on the chat between the Irish abroad meeting the locals who ask about Ireland because everyone knows who we are and are somehow fascinated by our history. They eulogize about The Troubles even though they still can't understand the complications of two cultures, two histories, two religions and two two currencies. The loyalist aspect versus the republican. Catholic versus Protestant. Westminster versus Leinster House. The punt and the euro. The north V south. The jackeen v the culchie. Don't even get me started on Irish 'class' either.
One thing I remember when I returned from years away, was no one was really interested in your experience away.
Try a homecoming from a culture like the Finnish one.
Paddy has no idea where Helsinki even is. Half the time my Mam says I'm in Russia, but I can forgive that, she has Alzheimer's. The younger relatives haven't a fucking clue and prefer it that way. Even mention any domestic element of life in our new host's country and the shackles go up: 'if you love it so much, why don't you fuck off back to it'?
I do.
It's the only thing that keeps me sane and under control around Paddy.
Not only friends and family, but employers, insurance companies, most of the State agencies. It counted for little.
A varied and colourful tale or list of life experiences can frighten some people - especially if you've been away long enough to have lost some of that Irish deference to authority: they fucking HATE that one.
Another iillustration, I knew people who had top design positions in a sequence of hugely successful productions while away, then coming back here, they were cast in assistant positions, in two bit local productions.
And no escape. They had to do their time, wait on the incumbents until they were old enough, basically. All that previous experience, and success, basically wiped out as if it had never happened.
Well that was one big reason I left in the first place myself, it didn't matter how good you were or how hard you worked.
Anyway on return you had to start again with no no claims bonuses, and a hundred other similar things.
But as to the question, not just of observing things from a distance, but learning and growing personally in your life.
This was something I thought about a lot when I came home. Old friends, where there once had been a continuous shared experience, and then for a long period, divergence, and completely different experiences, and then a joining together again on return.
But I considered how had they grown, staying here on Irish soil and how had I grown?
I considered I had grown much. I had lived five lives, seen so much done so much. And I remember when I did tell stories of those experiences, the reaction was usually "you should write a book..."
Hah! I get that one EVERY time.
But I am.
Because I have to.
But really what they're saying is a polite version of 'shut up'.
(You might say more about that kind of response, there was one element of dismissal in it sure, but another element that those type of experiences did truly seem so incredible and other worldly. They weren't really I think, it is just what happens when you really put yourself out there, and you free yourself of the "expectations" imposed on you, somehow, in this country, growing up and living here.)
Anyway, what I wanted to say was that when I looked at friends who had stayed here, they had also grown in worthy ways, somewhat different ways to myself, and I thought there was something salubrious and good in it, in their particular manner of personal growth.
Noting also that when I left, very young, in 1997, I was so disgusted with the ways of this country that I never wanted to see an Irish person again. I estimate in the first three years I came across about only three or four Irish people, I purposely went where I was unlikely to find them, and would go to the otherside of town or the country I was in, even, if I heard there were any about, if I wasn't tied there yet with work or the life there that I had encountered, that still beckoned.
I worked on the Irish pub scene both at home and abroad as an artist and as a musician. The network I built of the hundreds of Irish bars all over the world gave me a web to book myself into paid work abroad when there was none at home. Every January, head off and tour around because there's nothing going on in Ireland after the Christmas season - Paddy drops his savings buying all kinds of crap for the kids. So best to et the hell out for a couple of months.
Of course, the downside is that every one of the Irish circuit of pubs also has its own 'house Paddy' type alcoholics in their clean and crisp white shirts and their liver turned into sponge with the propping up the bar and regaling the locals about the romance of being Irish. These fuckers glue themselves to you and you have to be careful not to upset them too much either - they'll still be in that same pub long after I've left, and if you piss them off then they'll use their time drinking to lambast the fuck out of you so they won't hire you again.
That sort are just about the worst sad bastards you're ever going to meet.
I haven't been to an Irish bar in ten years or more - and Helsinki has seven or eight of them.
Perhaps something of an overreaction, but I mellowed, and my anger subsided as time went on, and I found myself missing some elements of my country, mainly I felt there was a depth of culture, of heritage, of history, that I was connected to, and that I felt bereft without, and the mooted substitute was pale or otherwise lacking in comparison.
In addition, I developed the feeling about certain ex-Pats I came across, that I didn't want to be like them, where their connections with their own homeland, wherever that was, were completely and irrevocably severed, after a certain passage of time, and their new connections had a somewhat superficial feeling about them, they lacked something in them.
Which brings me back to what I wanted to say about friends who never left. They weren't dumb, it wasn't that they couldn't see, and while their experiences differed they were rich in their own way.
And certainly compared to say the almost packaged experience of doing your one or two years in America or Australia, "sowing your wild oats", staying largely within Irish circles, following that well beaten path, or any other well beaten path like say secondment to another country in your employment, their experience was probably richer, and their view of things better.
Anyway on being slowly pulled back here I learned there is good living to be done in this country, and a life that you might want to live, no worse than in any other country, there are positives and negatives, as there are anywhere.
No doubt we are immature as a country, and as I have often said on here, at the root of that immaturity a peasant mindedness that is often as Mowl characterises it, in things like getting one over the next man, and in many other things.
I measure things from the ghetto up. Any decisions I've made about my life were made out of necessity for the most part, but the slamming of the door that comes with permanent ex-pat status is cold and harsh. I didn't
HAVE to leave, I
wanted to leave - for most of my younger life. I was the sort who'd want to know EVERYTHING about the travels of any of my elders.
But I came up against the state apparatus, and even though I was clean - they still tried to make a patsy out of me for someone else's sake. That was the last straw. It almost wiped me out at the time, to be honest - but it also served as the impetus to set me off, my teeth bared fearlessly into the wind.
I'm so glad I did, I really am.
But all you can do is change yourself. And speak out against what you see as wrong in the time and the moment, and bear the consequences of that speaking out, ride those consequences as far out as you can go, even.
I think there is enough in that, that is where any worthwhile revolution begins, I mean one that does not burn everything in its path, stupidly, and without heed for what is most human, and natural. And whatever someone's sins against their fellow man, well they are still a part of the brotherhood of man, and killing them or subjecting them, even if they subjected you, is not going to solve the problem, is it.
We're all on our own. Some find that hard to stomach, but not me: I'm truly happier where I am now than I could possibly have ever been had I stayed. I mean the chances of meeting someone like Jambo or any of his type of cowardly racist pigs is far higher on home turf than it is abroad.
That alone has its merits.
Thankfully, loads of Paddy types are terrified of the idea of living abroad.
This gives the rest of us a chance to re-dream the Irish dream abroad, and tell the truth about us.
I'm not afraid to speak about my childhood in Ireland. When I meet people who are thinking of giving Irish life a go and want to know more, I'll give them exactly what they asked for. And they're all broken hearted to hear about it. But no point in letting some innocent and well-meaning person go walking straight into the lion's den without any idea of the name of the beast.
What goes around comes around.
I served my time - but I got out clean.
