Say what?

Nearly three months have passed since we set sail* from the Emerald Isle; enough time to start to figure out what we've exported from our three years there. I've written before about wanting to hold onto our American positivity; with Ireland, what seems to have lasted is the language. Jonah, the only one of us to have ever truly passed as a native (despite his brother being the actual born-and-bred Gael), is starting to lose his Dub accent, which is both a shame and also a relief; it means he's hanging out with new buddies and absorbing their accents. A shame to be losing the accent, but a relief that he's not all alone in a corner of the classroom mourning his lost pals of the West.

Still, although an Irish accent isn't part of our family any more, it seems that certain words have crept in and are here to stay. I took the kids to buy new school shoes and runners last week; despite our best efforts, it's impossible to call the damn things 'trainers' when 'runners' is by far a more appropriate term for the footwear of a small boy.

Earlier this week, I had cause to teach Jonah when to use 'lashing' and when to use 'drizzling'; a distinction that made me giggle, because of course you'd need to know the word for a bloody great downpour in Ireland and a polite sniffle of rain in England. We're still inclined, as a family, to ask, 'Will I bring (the boys with me to the shop)?' rather than 'shall I take (the boys with me to the shop)?' Incremental differences, but they make me smile when I hear them. We seem to have slotted back into life in England with relatively few seams showing; but if you listen closely, the time overseas is there, embedded in our lexicon. Grand, so.


*oh, OK, it was RyanAir, but who the hell wants them in an opening sentence?

Life in the pale

I've got about a million posts brewing, and now the boxes are unpacked and I've stopped waking up wondering where we're living now, there's hope of getting to them soon. But in the meantime, here's Louis MacNeice describing my relationship with Dublin better than I ever could myself:

This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades -
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.

The rest of it's here if you don't know it - beautiful.