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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
FIRST EDITION
© @BorderIrish 2019
Illustrations © John Taylor, with the following exceptions: egg; scales of justice; paper and tape; road sign; elephant print; thumbs-up emoji; telegram; five review profile images; pint glass emoji; TV set; Celtic border; four-leaf clover © Shutterstock.com
‘Like a sinner …’ song lyric taken from ‘Bat Out of Hell’, written by Jim Steinman and performed by Meat Loaf
Cover design by Steve Leard © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photographs © Chris Clor/Getty Images (elephant), Shutterstock.com (grass)
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Source ISBN: 9780008356996
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008357016
Version 2019-10-17
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Contents
Howareye?
Well, now. How’s it going? C’mere to me, I was just minding my own business, being a largely invisible border that no one had thought about for years. And happy enough I was with that. It’s a tiring business, bordering. It’s a generally unhappy one too, at the best of times. But after decades of misery, there was me, semi-retired, a bit sleepy, carefree as a border can be. And then along comes Brexit.
BREXIT.
The very word makes me a bit green.
It caught me by surprise when it happened. You’re probably the same yourself. I woke up one morning and shook my grass, looking forward to another day of doing not very much, and there was a whole load of paparazzi, with the cameras flashing, shouting, ‘Hey, Irish Border! Look dark! Look threatening! Look sexy!’
Well, now, I’m attractive enough to look at, for a border, but it’s long since I appeared threatening to man or beast. I pulled the grass back around myself and tried to ignore them. They’re persistent, though, these fellas with the cameras, and they caught me a bit off-guard. So those early Brexit photos don’t show my best side. Then the journalists started to turn up, with all their daft questions: ‘How did you get here? Are you scared? How do you really feel?’ Hiding from British journalists sent by their editors to find me has been the only fun thing about Brexit. They write articles saying they’ve ‘straddled’ me (I know, the cheek of them) because they love to sound macho, but that actually means they couldn’t find me. So they guess I was somewhere in between all the windblown sheughs and the fields they got lost in before they wrote their article about me, holed up in a floral-curtained, swirly-carpeted Newry B&B while eating a saturated-fat local breakfast special.
Yes, I had thought I was going to go into retirement. I’d imagined a nice little EU-funded Museum of Myself in a few decades’ time, with a coffee shop and border-themed ice cream, but oh no. Along came Brexit, like some gobshite taking its first driving lesson, crashing all over the place. I took one look at Brexit and, says I to myself, ‘If a stop isn’t put to this soon I’ll be back to proper full-on bordering again. And I am a bit old for that kind of thing.’
‘How old are you, Border?’ I hear you saying, fictional reader. Well, now, there’s a question. It’s very hard to say. Do you ever think to yourself, ‘I’ll do this wee job as a stopgap, just to keep things ticking over until my creative career really takes off, and then 97-odd years later you look at yourself and you’re still doing the same thing?’ That’s me. I was meant to move after a few years, but you know what humans are like. Indecisive. Time passes fair quick, doesn’t it? But also very slowly, says you. And that’s the truth as well. But time has passed, and thank the Lord above for it, because time has had little enough useful to offer me this past century except the last twenty-odd years since the Good Friday Agreement. They’ve been grand, in comparison, those two decades of birdsong. But, in hindsight, now that I put my mind to it, and ponder recent events, maybe I was a bit too reclusive since 1998. Maybe I was a complacent border.
You know that way you put something down in a place and then that’s the place the thing stays? And then, you know that thing when something is really important and you put it somewhere obvious so you’ll remember it? And then you forget about it? And then later (let’s say, over 97 years later) you fall over it in the middle of the night? Yeah? That’s the British government and me. Completely forgot about me. Eejits.
Back in the 1920s, a panel of ‘experts’ of different political persuasions were meant to re-draw me one day on a tea break. But they argued with each other, as official people do, and nothing changed. It wasn’t the first time, and by God it wasn’t the last time, that men in suits argued about where I should be, what I should do and how to cross me.