The boy is gripped to my stomach in a sling as we head out of my dad’s house. I like the sling because it makes the country roads of the Derry/Donegal border easier to navigate than a pram, plus it has the added bonus of making me feel like that dude that carries Krang around in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The fact that I was born and raised on the Irish border used to be the most boring part of my life story. Even during the Troubles, we didn’t have much by way of headlines. Sure, an explosion once destroyed the customs hut at the top of our field and blew out our windows, but even then, it was presumed the IRA only did it because they had some spare bombs lying around.
Now, of course, it’s famous, even though for most people it’s still just the line the BBC news uses to separate the bits of Ireland that do and don’t have weather.
For me it’s home, a beautiful place to walk my son to sleep, and now imagine with a fully staffed military fence rolling over its fields and hills. The secret truth of Northern Ireland is that it’s boringly picturesque. In a just world, my homeland would be infamous only for rally driving, potato bread and a lamentable passion for dire, homegrown country music.
My father’s fencing is the only structure that separates Derry from Donegal for its 100m span. My dad’s house is not merely on the Irish border, but actually part of its 302-mile length. I humbly submit that the people of Pembrokeshire, Hackney or the Wirral would be equally unenthusiastic about a militarised border devouring a quarter of their house and placing dogs and wire between themselves and their neighbours.
There’s a reason why the dividing line here is not only unmarked but nonexistent; people who live where the border is most real, invariably spend their time making it as imaginary as possible.
The route we take from the house weaves in and out of both countries without fanfare and no one we meet seems particularly worried yet. They’re more energised by my son, delighted to discover that my bulging paunch – which, from a distance, might have seemed the happy result of too many buttered spuds – is actually a little passenger, complete with appealingly chubby, dangling legs.
The news is still on when we return home, and greyscale cabinet ministers sit on cheerily lit couches, describing the circumstances by which they will deposit barbed wire, machine guns and Alsatian hounds on my father’s doorstep. He changes the channel to its more usual station and drowsy, checkshirted men from Lisburn are once more heard crooning about the dirt roads of rural Alabama. May my son continue having the luxury to call it the worst thing about his trips home.
Follow Seamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
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