@BorderIrish - I Am the Border, So I Am

Copyright Copyright Note to the Reader I am the Border, so I am Glossary Acknowledgements About the Publisher

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollins Publishers 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 © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019

Cover photographs © Chris Clor/Getty Images (elephant), Shutterstock.com (grass)

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

asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

Source ISBN: 9780008356996

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008357016

Version 2019-10-17

Note to the Reader Note to the Reader I am the Border, so I am Glossary Acknowledgements About the Publisher

Certain portions of text in this ebook are set in a specific font type to make it easier to distinguish between the different types of content in the book. It may not be possible to change the font for these pieces of text.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Copyright Copyright Note to the Reader I am the Border, so I am Glossary Acknowledgements About the Publisher HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk First published by HarperCollins Publishers 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 © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019 Cover photographs © Chris Clor/Getty Images (elephant), Shutterstock.com (grass) A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green Source ISBN: 9780008356996 Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008357016 Version 2019-10-17

Note to the Reader Note to the Reader Note to the Reader I am the Border, so I am Glossary Acknowledgements About the Publisher Certain portions of text in this ebook are set in a specific font type to make it easier to distinguish between the different types of content in the book. It may not be possible to change the font for these pieces of text.

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.