Yesterday a man, Glaswegian, asked me the never ceasing what do you think of it here? question. The question was followed by a cock-eyed intense look and expectant pause. I had the feeling a pendulum was waiting to launch depending on the vowels I chose with which to fill said pause. It was morning, I needed a painkiller for my killing-me-ribs and wanted to get up the stairs swiftly. I thus filled it with the words that would achieve that and off I hopped.

Truthfully I should have answered on any given day at any given hour I think about 156 different things about here. Many of them are contradictory and include the chastisement geography is in the mind.

During the recent two week sojourn away from here, I also thought 156 different things an hour about there. Many of the things I had stacked up about there, in order to improve my disposition to being here were swiftly dismissed or rearranged. Damn it. People there would ask me of here. They’d ask me in that “Canada’s lovely so it is” amen tone. Lucky you. They wanted to be told life is much better here than it currently might be there. I had to paint strip away at imagined Canadian utopia on the North side and South side of Dublin, in Mayo and even on the bus in between.

In total that gives me 312 things thought an hour about 2 different places. Of which about 6 and a half make actual sense.

Within the here and the there, it is people more than geography that affect me. This morning I had coffee with a gang who raise me up here. Last week it was a gang there. Sin e. I appear to be blessed in the here and the there.  And now I am off to eat dinner with my marvellous males who have to put up with me when I am here and there and dithery in the in between.

And then there’s the advantage of ageing….