When Brexit finally had my nerves completely wrecked, my friend Jean says to me, ‘Border, ah come on now, you’re going to have to speak up for yourself.’
Jean and I have known each other forever and she’s always worth listening to. Maybe not always. She’s generally worth listening to.
‘Jean,’ I said, ‘I’m a geopolitical line of demarcation between two countries in the EU. I’m also politically contentious, a bit pointless and totally covered in grass, ruminants of various shapes and sizes, roads of a major and minor kind, and I have a penchant for talking in overly long sentences when I get going. How the hell am I going to get myself heard?’
‘Twitter!’ Jean said. ‘It’s perfect for spouting about politics when you’re not really sure what’s going on.’
‘Grand,’ says I, ‘I’ll give it a lash.’
So this is me, @BorderIrish. I used @BorderIrish because Jean said it sounded cool and interesting, and @TheBorderImposedbytheBritishonIrelandAgainsttheWilloftheMajorityofthePeopleofthe IslandThoughNotAlltobeTotallyFairAboutIt is too long for a Twitter handle, apparently. Though it has never stopped anyone on Twitter suggesting I use it.
Jean told me I was made for Twitter. She’d read in a history book that when Michael Collins went in to Downing Street in 1921 to negotiate the Treaty, he said to Lloyd George, ‘The Irish are a sovereign people. We cannot accept the partition of the island.’
And Lloyd George replied, ‘Mr Collins, consider the metaphysical Twitter possibilities we would put in place for future generations.’ Big Mick hadn’t thought of this. Ten minutes later they were shaking hands and Collins had agreed to take the 26 counties while the sovereign people waited for someone to invent Twitter. Apparently de Valera sent Collins to do the negotiating because he knew it would end up in a stupid Twitter account and he didn’t want the blame for it. Then there was a civil war. Jean’s some reader, always with the book in her hand, so I’m sure this is all true.
That’s how I ended up on Twitter in the middle of this Brexit ruination. It’s how I’ve made myself heard and how, in my own small and insignificant way, I have totally messed up Brexit.
I have been pursuing the ironic strategy of having to shout to stay quiet, to be seen to be invisible, to be surreal in order to continue with my mundane reality.
This is how preposterous Brexit has made me. It’s very tiring – but oh, sometimes it’s worth it for the craic. Do you ever have the feeling that you’re talking absolute sh*te but the sh*te you’re talking is less sh*te than most of the other sh*te being talked, and way less sh*te than the worst sh*te being talked, so you might as well head on with yer own sh*tetalking? That’s Twitter.
Still, it’s important. I am a mere border. I have no brain, no feet, and definitely no robot lawn-mower like David Davis does, but I care about all my peoples on either side of me. And I do not completely believe anymore that the UK government does. I just want to be a subliminally existing and unobtrusive border giving vague definition to increasingly meaningless and nostalgically pointless political ideologies which no one can quite remember other than as a commodified feature of tourist kitsch. I am a GPS-confusing, soft-as-the-bee’s-wing-brushing-on-lily-petal, jingoism-defying, Brexit-blocking, human-loving, peace-miracle-working, physical-infrastructureless, data-roaming-contradicting, wryly-amusing, caught-in-a-very-bad-situation-comedy kind of border.
I have no idea what’s going to happen to me. Maybe there’ll be No Deal. I lie awake at night, thinking about No Deal. I look at the stars above, and remember the customs posts, and the men in uniforms, and the women with the butter hidden in places I wouldn’t look at. And then I remember the checkpoints and the soldiers. And the pain. The pain and the mourning. Every day. You have to stand up to people who disrespect you, who make promises and then break them, who think their agenda is more important than yours, who say they’re listening but are actually thinking about themselves while staring at you. You have to stand up for yourself.
So I am standing up for myself, online and in print. I’m a line, though not materially so, and that’s a little hard to figure. Think of me as grass shimmering gently in a heat haze and that will give an approximate sense of how overwhelmingly attractive I am. Think of my mind as being like an Irish Last of the Summer Wine but about Brexit and with a twist of Kierkegaard. Think of me as The Times crossword – solved daily, and yet next morning you open the paper and there I am again with no answers filled in.
Think of me as something you can forget, though, and I’ll let you know you picked the wrong border to forget about.
I’m a functioning, actually-existing constructive ambiguity, an accommodation of irreconcilabilities. A post-borderist border who is staying post-borderist, thank you very much. That annoys people who want firm lines and certainty and absolutes and things that are singularly simplesimplesimple, but I can’t be that. I won’t.
If you read this here book, or follow me on Twitter, you’ll know I joke about it, but Brexit is serious – lives and limbs and loves and losses, mornings and mournings and moorings and migrations, jobs and lazy afternoons and evening kisses and lie-ins and tall tales – they could all change because of Brexit. If I could sing it’d be sweeter than the nightingale’s song, but I can’t. Still and all, here I am, so I am, and heard I will be.
Twitter Archive
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Bord26489713 @BorderStudent I did it! Graduated today from Bordering School! Stoked to be starting out on my bordering career in this febrile post-war world! 3:51 pm – 5 July 1919 |
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The Temporary Irish Border @BorderIrish Some personal news – just got new job as temporary Irish border. Excited to get bordering for real on the beautiful ‘Emerald Isle’! 9:42 am – 3 May 1921 |
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The Temporary Irish Border @BorderIrish Humbled to have become a (temporary!) international border. Wow! Look at me, Mum! 10:11 am – 7 December 1922 |
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The Irish Border @BorderIrish I’m going to be stuck in this deadend job forever, amn’t I? Boundary Commission my arse 11:26 am – 20 December 1925 |
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The Irish Border @BorderIrish New Year’s Day. Well woo-f***ing-hoo here I am still on this miserable, rain-sodden island with no one to talk to other than Flann O’Brien and 2 ducks 11:02 am – 1 January 1939 |
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Bernie McFadden & Co Solicitors, so we are |