@BorderIrish - I Am the Border, So I Am

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.’