Plastic Paddy

My mum always told me that I was Irish. "You're only English by an accident of birth." she said. And that might be true but it wasn't my accident. And that my two Irish parents met and married in London and continued to live there after my birth might suggest a degree of premeditation. Even after they decided to leave London they didn't move back "home" (Ireland is always "home" to the Irish diaspora - especially the ones who haven't been back there for forty years) - they moved to the south coast of England: the saucy seventies sea-side town of Portslade. If Brighton is the Olympic sized swimming pool and Hove is an elegant Edwardian bathing machine, then Portslade is the old man washing his balls with Vosene in the showers.

My Irishness and its associative Catholicism dictated a lot about my life. I went to special Catholic schools so my friends were the sons and daughters of other Irish people, as well as very occasional Poles or Italians. My class photos are a sea of white, freckled faces. There was always an adjoining church on site and on set times of the year we would be subjected to the thoughts and opinions of a rosy-faced man in a dress who smelled oddly like jumbo markers. These homilies would be as windy and dry as a sirocco and with as much lasting impact. Years later I would take an interest in the Bible and study it semi-seriously as a comparative mythology. None of it had anything to do with the priests, nuns or de-frocked monks who taught me. I didn't know many English people for the first ten years of my life. But I did know my uncle Len. Len wasn't really my uncle - he was my dad's mate from work. He had a gravelly cockney accent, a hook nose and heavy-framed glasses, smoked Turkish cigarettes and had well-cut suits. He seemed impossibly glamorous to me. In my mind he was both Jewish and Italian, though he was neither, because he was flamboyant and spoke with his hands. He had been in the war (which the Irish hadn't - they had an emergency, which sounded rubbish) and he told very few stories about it, which preserved his mystery, but those he did tell were absolutely filthy. He was a great bloke. And English.

Meanwhile, the people down the Irish club had great tufty white heads and red faces. The women had tight brown perms and danced with each other to waltzes played on Casio keyboards, while the men lined up against the bar, supping pints of the black stuff in their nasty brown suits. I hated it and I hated the boys I was supposed to play with there. I wanted to be at home drawing superheroes in felt-tip on computer paper. It was all about football which I hated, having worked out I would never be any good at it. Also, my Dad had no interest in football so we never went. He did have a team he was a nominal fan of but it was such obvious lip-service that, at this remove, I can no longer remember which one it was, though I can still remember that my London cousins were fans of Queens Park Rangers, a team I hadn't heard of then and still haven't heard of now. Was it Spurs? Was my Dad pretending to be a Spurs fan for office/ pub bantz? In his later years he became a blazer and booze Rugby Fan, which suited him a lot better. At least the Irish play rugby.

My friends would go off on package holidays to Spain and Greece. My holidays seemed to be in a succession of country kitchens full of people who were apparently related to me and attempting to feed me hairy bacon and runny eggs. We went to Sligo where my Mum is from and they didn't tell me it was by the sea. It was more kitchens, more bacon, more tea. On one occasion my dad pointed to a building and said "That's my old house". It looked like a collection of standing stones. The Druids would have admitted it was a bit of a fixer upper. I couldn't imagine how it could ever have been a home for seven people. Rising damp would have looked about for something a bit more des res.

I appreciate this reflects badly on me. We were quite poor growing up and there was no money for treats, or holidays or fruit. We had no car and we rented a TV (everybody did). But we did have plumbing. There was no lichen inside our house. The walls didn't look like they were hewn from living rock by Titans. This henge that my Dad claimed to have grown up in was completely outside of my life experience. Later on that holiday we went to a shop that I seem to recall being a wooden cabin halfway up a mountain. It was run by a nice old woman who kept talking to me in a language I couldn't understand. This was not a shop in the sense that I would recognise - I was used to Portslade's high-street super-mart "Shopper's Paradise" (don't go looking for it - its not there anymore). This was no Shopper's Paradise - this was a shed with some tins in it. It even smelled like a shed - that sort of musty, mulchy smell, as though the wood were only on loan from nature and might return to it without warning. Worst of all was that it was the summer holidays and there were special summer holidays children's programmes including repeats of The Monkees' TV show. The Monkees' TV show was my favourite thing ever and I was missing it. Instead I was eating a piece of bacon that looked like an old man's ear in a stranger's kitchen. I never saw daylight that entire holiday. I went back to school pale and hollow-eyed and with an addiction to secondary smoking. I used to waft past the Staff Room like a Bisto kid. 

This is only my experience. My brother Edward used to go over and have a great time. He went fishing with my Granddad and even caught a fish. My brother Barry used to know loads of songs, some of them in Irish. They seemed much more adept at being Irish than me. I was just rubbish at it. I don't even really like Guinness. My aunt was appalled to find out I didn't know who Phil Coulter was. "You should make a bit of an effort to listen to something new," she chided. Though her own knowledge of Krautrock was lamentable. I know the first two lines of a song about a little green boat in a sort of phonetic Irish. That's it. Shameful. To this day I will happily listen to (some) English folk songs - the older, weirder and starker the better - but Irish music always seemed to be divided into two categories: lachrymose ballads about "croppie boys" or the endless, nameless widdling of the pub session, where the concept of "don't bore us - get to the chorus" has never been heard because the concept of a chorus doesn't exist. Any and all of these are preferable to modern Irish country jive however. Songs about trucks and going down to the old fishin' hole sung by men who look like butchers in skinny jeans and women who look they've just checked into the bridal suite of a country hotel. The videos are often quite good, however - Robert Mizzle's "Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am" suggests a land that time forgot, where brides roll their eyes and wave fists and Jack-the-lads in Stetsons sit in the pub with girls on their knees winking broadly to camera. Perhaps the country is still like this. Certainly all of the Northern Irish regional television programming presents the male "cultchies" as winking and grinning slippery customers, forever on the make and indulging in Del Boy-like get rich quick schemes, while their wives and girlfriends, fists permanently on hips, stoically keep everything together. Perhaps that's what its like.

I don't know. I don't live in the country. I live in Belfast. No one is more surprised about this than I am. I've been here for nine years now. I'm not quite used to it. It feels like a slight betrayal to be living in Northern Ireland. I'm VERY Irish, genetically. The Higgins on both sides of the family (my mum's maiden name was also Higgins - don't worry. Its all above board. If anything my ears are smaller than average) were stubbornly entrenched, probably forever. Ambrosio O' Higgins, the Viceroy of Chile, was a Sligo Higgins* like my mum's lot, but I can't find any evidence that we're closely linked. My dad's family are so Irish that all records disappear before the twentieth century. We may well be fairy folk. My Dad left though. He moved to London in the 60s. Got a white collar job when the "No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish" signs were still up in bedsitter windows. He married an Irish girl, moved to the seaside and they had four big headed babies. He wrenched himself out of the motherland and here I am, back again. Sorry Dad. I've rocked up with my hoity toity voice and my red face and white hair, the very same face I used to hate on the lads in the Irish Club. I am not Irish. But I am a bit Irish.

Northern Ireland is an unusual place. I was a "blow in" when I arrived and I'll be a "blow in" till the day I leave. I have been warmly (never hotly - its not Norn's style) embraced by the people here, who are often at pains to point out my difference. They do impressions of my voice, much as the people of England - myself included - have done impressions of those of their friends who have accents different to their own. The boot is firmly on the other foot. There is a lot of anti-English feeling too - even from the sort of people who riot because the Union Flag isn't on display at City Hall. 

Some English people are alright. Those people are Northerners. They are warm and approachable, and they can take a drink and they're a right laugh. They have interesting cities and beautiful countryside. They're not too bad. For the English. 

Its the other lot that are the problem. Southerners. Colourless Little Englanders with their endless shabby suburbs and their hollowed out, empty accents. With their fat necked polo shirt wearing football thugs and their prim, withered on the vine, genital-free toffs. Sexless, brittle, boring and dry and still squarely responsible for the iniquities of the Empire and Brexit, both of which they revere. They have perfect gardens and prefer dogs to children and never speak to their neighbours who are identical to them. That huge, dull, cultural desert, that produces no good bands but produces thugs and yuppies in legions. You know - my lot. That's who they mean when they slag off the British because by British they mean English and by English they mean southern English. And they're right. It is a bit shameful coming from a town that has only ever had a Tory MP (and usually a fucking awful one), that is famous chiefly for roundabouts and Insurance companies and has had no famous bands ever.** Sarah Ferguson, the most ludicrous royal is from there, the braying idiot who married the sweatless pervert prince. She's an ambassador for the place. Liz Hurley used to drink in the pub at the bottom of our road. When she was a punk. Its that sort of town. 

The English are not loved. And the place they are least loved is Ireland. The Americans think the English are quaint. The Germans have always had an odd fondness for the English, and the French refuse to believe the English exist, but the Irish hate the English and quite reasonably too. So, when you're an English man with that hated English accent but you grow up with two Irish parents insisting you were Irish while living in England it can be hard to know where you fit in.

I thought I'd be a musician when I was younger. I think now I was trying to find a way of reconciling to my Irishness, as all of my favourite bands in my teens were second generation Irish: The Beatles, The Smiths, The Cult (well, Billy Duffy), Oasis. Well, no - I always hated Oasis and if I'm honest I always preferred The Rolling Stones to the Beatles, despite there not being a single Irish link to the Stones. But I was clinging to anything that I could claim as my identity, and besides with the Smiths you got that route right back to Oscar Wilde, a wit and an exotic - an exotic Irishman! Not many of those in Ballyhackamore.

 Of course, I wouldn't have known any of this without my best friend at school, Robin, who had also transferred from somewhere else to Basingstoke, but unlike me had fitted right in, despite his Lou Reed mullet and the fact that he had an Irish accent. I had no older brothers and would have probably had no interest in music at all without  our weekly trips to Basingstoke's two Our Prices (the one at the Top o' Town was the better one and had the added benefit of a really beautiful goth girl working in it). Robin's brother's accent seemed to melt away almost as he arrived in England but Robin retained his, and though he now lives in Spain his accent is possibly more Irish than it was thirty years ago. And my accent too is probably more fruitily English now than it was when I arrived in Belfast. Stubborn wankers, the pair of us.  

Ireland is the great exporter of its sons and daughters. The Irish export themselves everywhere, they settle and they become respectable and usually massively right wing. They breed and tell their children that they're Irish and that the auld sod is their home, and so these dutiful children of Ireland return to the Motherland, where the natives take tremendous delight in telling them they aren't even close to being Irish. The Irish are a friendly and welcoming people - as long as you don't make the claim for your Irishness. You are not and no amount of naturalisation will make you Irish. Its not the blood its the soil. Its the green. Its the language. Its the actual being from here-ness of it all. I've been here a decade and I'm just realising now that I'll only ever be a blow in. And that's okay - there is special scorn reserved for those foreigners who become "more Irish than the Irish". I shall continue to be what I always have been: an Englishman with Irish parents. 

*Sligo Higgins sounds like a childhood friend of Gollum.

**Tanita Tikaram didn't move to Basingstoke until her early teens and is therefore no more a native Basingstoker than I am. And I don't think she's been back since the ink dried on her record contract.