Where am I from?

Thinking about where I've come from, where I am now, and why Brussels feels more than ever like home - after a trip back to what used to be home.

Brussels Airport Terminal A

Friday, 9am

There they are, my people. My tribe. The bog men and bog women of Éire. Queuing up at the gate for our flight back to Ireland in good time. Very good time. They’ll not be boarding for another 45 minutes, but you wouldn’t want to be left having to put your free luggage in the luggage hold, would you? Herself used always to laugh at my ability to identify a fellow Gael abroad. Of course, I know it’s them because they’re standing around the Ryanair gate for Dublin, and look, there’s the Ambassador himself waiting to board. It’s too early to strike up a conversation, and anyway some of the social reserve of the Vlamingen I’ve lived around for over a decade has rubbed off on me over the years. But for all of my continental airs, for all of the 15 years I’ve lived away from Mother Ireland, I join the queue. I am still, deep in my bones, a bog man too. I think.

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The Lord Edward pub, Dublin

Friday, 3pm

Taking the number 16 bus from the airport I tick off the familiar waypoints heading into town. My grandfather’s house on the Shanrath Road. The Omni shopping centre where he’d take us for Pizza Hut on a Friday evening, and the Beaumont House pub where we might go for a carvery lunch on a Sunday. We passed by his church, and redbricked Millmount Avenue on the banks of the Tolka where he grew up, near the stadium where he took me to my first football match, and we passed Fagan’s pub, the Skylon, and the bishop’s palace. 

I’m thinking of all this while waiting at the wonky bar of the Lord Edward for my pint. If the wiry barman pouring it were to ask me what I was up to and where I was from, what would I say? Would I give him the short answer - Brussels. Or the longer one - Brussels via Cork and Dublin. Or the bolder one, fuelled by a couple of early afternoon pints: Dublin. I mean, that’s what the Irish state would answer. It says so on my birth certificate: at the Rotunda Hospital on the other bank of the Liffey on Parnell Square, to parents living at 467 Cranlough Road in Cabra. My northsider credentials are, on paper, impeccable. 

But I have no memory of ever living in that small suburban Dublin house. We moved two years after I was born, to faraway Cork. For me, Dublin might have been where my mother was from, but it was a place to go “up to”, never “back to”. I might have known when to drop in a strategic deadly or yiz into a sentence when talking with my Dublin cousins, but they’d never let me forget that I was not one of them. To them, I was a Cork man with a Cork accent, a culchie. Beyond the Pale. The barman might agree with them, if I told him I was from Dublin. He’d probably smile in a condescending way, and maybe throw in an “Is that right?” just to twist the knife. I mean, his scepticism would be warranted. If opening my mouth wasn’t enough to betray me, then ordering a pint of Beamish within spitting distance of St James’ Gate was enough to mark me. Always a tourist. Never a local.

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Counihans, Cork

Saturday, 3pm

I’ve switched to the Murphy’s. Two pints into what’s going to become an all-dayer, I’m wondering if I’ve ever been in Counihans before. The pub is packed with Munster fans on pre-match pints. The front of Counihans is all wood panelling, low stools and cramped tables, and mirrors with brewery names printed on them. Beyond the bar the pub is larger and more spacious but bland in a way of many pubs that underwent a Celtic Tiger makeover in the fat years. We’re jammed in a narrow aisle between the two, and whenever someone crosses the threshold you can hear a newspaper hawker shouting the word “Echo!”. I’ve my Munster jersey on, my pint of Murphy’s half drunk. The accent may have dulled in years spent abroad talking to foreigners, but a couple of hours back among friends acts on it like a whetstone on a knife, and now already drawling out my vowels and have slipped into a heightened sing-song cadence. We’re in the centre of Ireland’s Real Capital, and I couldn’t be much more of a langer if I tried. If I’m from anywhere, it should be here. 

Cork, or more specifically Carrigaline, is where I lived from when we moved into our detached dormer bungalow at the end of a cul de sac in a newbuild housing estate on the edge of town in 1989 until I left for university in 2004. It wasn’t quite a New Town, more of a satellite of the city proper than a suburb. I remember being proud of the fact we learned in secondary school that it was Ireland’s fastest growing town. It was, when we were kids, the kind of place where everyone came from somewhere else, where everyone was a blow-in, save for that one weirdo who could trace his family’s roots back to more than a generation. Carrigaline had a Main St, a church (well two, if you include the Protestant one), a supermarket, two chippers, and a bunch of pubs. It was not a place to stir your soul, but it is where I made my most vivid childhood memories and long-lasting friendships. In an article I wrote last month for the Irish Times, I outlined briefly why, even in a town full of blow-ins, I never really felt like I fit in, and how I was always preparing for the time when I could escape. A part of this came from the fact that, as good as I thought I was at code-switching, as proficient as I was at drawing out my words and dropping “like” in at every pause for breath, the accent I’d inherited from my mother - diluted and all as it was - kept identifying me as an interloper. Try as I might, I just couldn’t give it the full Corkonian. There was, as my friends might have pointed out, too much of the jackeen about me.

Conversation in the pub drifts into talk about a recent concert in a new venue up near Montenotte. I’m reminded that in a previous life the concert hall was a chapel, annexed to a hospice, where we held my mother’s removal. Earlier that day I’d taken a trip up to the graveyard, on a hill outside of Carrigaline. I bet in all the years growing up in Santry she never thought she'd end up buried alone on a desolate bit of hill in no man's land. Cork might have been home once, and I still enjoy spending time there, but I never really took to it, nor it to me, and now it’s too full of ghosts, and every street corner haunted.

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Brussels Noord Station, Brussels

Sunday, 8pm

I step through the golden entrance doors of the station and out into the wet streets, exhaling the stresses of long day’s travel and inhaling Brussels. Coming back to the city feels like putting on an old coat. Yes it’s tired and worn with holes in the elbows and a musty smell hangs around it. But it fits, and it’s familiar and comforting.

This summer Brussels will overtake Cork as the place I’ve lived in the longest. To even entertain the idea that I might be from Brussels is to raise the hackles of a certain cadre of nativist internet trolls who fulminate at the idea that the city’s itinerant international population would have any claim on their city. I have, after all, no ancestral connection to Brussels, and I only really speak one and a half of its official languages. As I’ve written before, it’s a city that thrills and irritates me in equal measure. But isn’t that what your hometown is supposed to do? And haven’t I lived in the Marollen for a couple of years, a sort of repository of ur-Brussels folk memory and tradition. We even left before gentrification really took hold - what’s more Brussels than that? I’m raising Brussels children, and I might even eventually get Belgian citizenship.

I spent a lot of time over my weekend in Ireland listening to Donal Fallon’s excellent Three Castles Burning podcast about Dublin and its history. In one episode Fallon reads out a quote from poet Parick Kavanagh about how “Dublin was the cruellest city on the face of the earth…A city should ignore you, like London did, which gave you the English cold shoulder. A city should be impersonal. But Dublin was full of warm promises.” Brussels and London share this disinterest in their citizens. Brussels doesn’t care about you; in fact, it more often than not sees you as an impediment, a nuisance to the orderly functioning of the city. But that’s fine for me. If Dublin and Cork are anxious family members whose relationship to me I have no control over, eager to know your business, with spies lurking around every corner, then Brussels is a friend to whom I can give just as much of myself as I want, and no more. If Brussels feels like home, like where I’m from at the moment - and I know now I’m conflating the two - it’s because I’ve chosen it as my home. 

That’s why, if I’m checking into a hotel or buying museum tickets or making small talk with a slender barman at pub in Dublin while he lets my pint settle, I’ll say: I’m from Brussels.

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Miscellaneous Notes

• How great is the Lord Edward pub, by the way? I tried to get a photo of their famously titled bar, but it just didn’t come through how slanty it was in real life. If you’re near Christchurch a definite recommend.

• Speaking of pubs closer to home I finally managedto get myself to Au Duc du Brabant last weekend for a few beers. May be worth writing about the place in the future. One to bookmark for sure.

• It’s been a difficult week in Brussels on the news front, with daily reports of deadly shoot-outs between rival drugs gangs in St Gillis and Anderlecht. Here’s a good report on what’s happening at the Peterbos complex in the latter.