I Am the Border, So I Am

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

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)

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008356996

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008357016

Version 2019-10-17

Note to the Reader

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to the Reader

I am the Border, so I am

Glossary

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

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. I think this is why I’m so at home on Twitter; it’s full of people pretending they know what they’re doing but never getting anywhere.

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

Newry and Border Area Branch

14.2.18

Hello Border,

I hope you don’t mind me getting on to you and maybe we could forget that time with the stolen geese. I was only follwoing my client’s instructions. Here, I was thinking, this Brexit’s some piece of work and you might be needing a solicitor with a good constitutional background. I also have access to a bit of dirt on the some of the Brexity lads. What do you think? Pro bono, like.

Cheers now,

Bernie

There’s an ancient saying around here: ‘When the blossom is on the whitethorn, when the swallows return, your cack-handed attempt at re-animating the corpse of Reaganomics via rancid populism will founder on the rock of human goodness.’

Brexit Is Like …

It’s like the way this afternoon, there I was watching a guy in Pettigo trying to build a garden shed. He had it half built. Then it fell down. His neighbour looked over the fence and said, ‘Sam, are you ok?’ Sam said, ‘I’ve made a complete f***ing Brexit of it.’ And his neighbour said, ‘You have, surely.’

It’s like the way you say, ‘Regulatory divergence may mean some border checks’ but I hear ‘We’re going to make you wear flares and listen to prog rock and generally make like it’s the early 70s’.

It’s like the way you drift off to sleep and then suddenly wake up and kick the bedclothes off, as if someone’s attacking you, and then your heart races for a while and you’re all alert and can’t get back to sleep. That’s what being a hard border is like, over and over again.

It’s like when people say, ‘There must be an innovative technological solution to the Irish Border problem’ and I say, ‘Aye, there is. Get a specially designed centralised government computer system and type in the word BREXIT, so that everyone can see it. Then you press DELETE 6 times. Then RETURN.’

It’s like when Jim’s mum knitted him a jumper in purple with big long sleeves and she didn’t get the neckline quite right and he went out wearing it and the other kids laughed at him and his mum said they’re just jealous, Jim, but Jim wasn’t quite sure if that was true.

I’m like The Times simple crossword puzzle: easily solved every day by people who can’t be bothered trying the cryptic one.

It’s like that thing when you’re doing your job perfectly well and then along come some daft management consultants who know nothing about what you do and they make a complete mess of it.

Me

Brexit

Jim!

‘Jim!’ I blurted out. I couldn’t help it.

‘Yes, Border.’

‘What are you doing, Jim?’

‘Just standing here.’

‘I see that, Jim. There’s no disputing the fact that you’re standing there, and fair play to you, Jim, you’re excellent at it. And I don’t mind you standing there. You’re as well there as anywhere, and probably better. There’s worse places you could be standing than beside me, Jim. Nevertheless, and I hope you won’t begrudge me raising this with you, but I recall now that you said you were Leaving …’

‘I am.’

‘And similarly, and correct me if I’m wrong, Jim, I recall that you said this three years ago. In the year of our Lord two thousand and sixteen to be precise.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Years ago now. And yet, one might say, without intended criticism of your lack of activity on the Leaving front, you’ve been standing there since then.’

‘And doing nothing, Border.’

‘Doing, as you say yourself, Jim, nothing.’

‘I’m Leaving, Border.’

‘Ok, Jim.’

Now, look, you know me by now. I’m not going to stop anybody Leaving. Nor, within reason, am I going to stop anybody standing still doing zilch. It just struck me that there was something of a gap between Jim’s belief that he was going somewhere and the fact that he wasn’t. Clearly Jim is, in his own mind, a Leaver, but his Leaving skills seemed a bit underdeveloped. It’s interesting, in a mind-numbingly paralysing way, to think about this Brexity paradox.

It crossed my mind that maybe he needed a little help, or at least that it might help him to talk about it. The UK negotiators kept using the phrase ‘reach out’. They’d say things like, ‘I’m going to reach out to the Irish side,’ which I thought was weird and probably illegal the first time I heard it, but eventually I realised they just meant ‘talk to without shouting at’. So I reached out to Jim, idiomatically.

‘Jim.’

‘Yes, Border.’

‘Have you thought about how to Leave?’

‘In what way?’

‘Moving is not really my area of expertise, Jim, but just off the top of my head, you could go that way, or that way. You could walk or run or even take a plane.’

‘You’re being difficult now. I’m Leaving.’

‘Ok, Jim.’

Meeting Rupert, Who Is Not Olly

What to do? There’s Brexit, yakking away to itself with its thumbs in its waistcoat like some out-of-work barrister practising in front of the mirror in its bedroom, and I’m lying here thinking, do these people not realise that my whole existence as a semi-retired geopolitical boundary is now in question?

It turns out some of them do, though. They’re not all as thick as the neck on Barney’s best bull.

This lad turns up one day not long after the referendum looking a bit shifty – but too well-dressed for diesel-laundering.

‘Howareye?’ says me, non-committal but friendly, like.

‘Ah, hello, are you the Irish Border?’ he says. He sounded posh. ‘Only, it’s rather odd, talking to something invisible.’

‘Better than talking to a wall’, says me.

‘Yes’, he says, ‘quite so, but we wouldn’t want to …’

‘Aye, I’m only messing,’ I says. ‘What’s that in your hand there, fella?’

‘My passport. I thought that maybe you’d need to see it, you know, being a border.’

‘You’ve a lot to learn about this border, mate. You don’t need it. Nice suit, by the way.’

‘Thanks. Actually, I wanted a word. I’ve been sent on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government to … I suppose … to negotiate with you.’

‘Ok. That’s nice. I thought yous had all forgotten about me.’

‘We had. Then you tweeted that photo of the elephant and said, “There’s me at the Brexit negotiations,” and …’

‘They sent you here. I see. Well, if we’re going to be negotiating we better get to know each other. What’s your name?’

‘I’d prefer not to say.’

‘Can I call you, oh, I don’t know – Olly?’

‘What?! NO!! How did you know?’

‘What about Mr Robbins?’

‘No.’

‘If I can’t call you Olly then I need a name for you. You look like a Rupert. You look like you went to a school full of Ruperts. You carry yourself like a Jasper, or a Quentin, or a Whimpleberry, or a Rupert. Can I call you Rupert?’

‘If you must. Chatham House Rules apply.’

‘So no tweeting our discussions then, Rupert?’

‘No tweeting.’

‘Not even a wee allusion to the fact that such discussions are being mooted?’

‘No tweeting.’

‘How about if I do it as a fictional dialogue between the two of us that will be published in a book at a later date, after the time when Brexit is meant to have happened, but when it’ll probably still be dragging on tediously?’