So the sun goes down on another blisteringly hot day in Burlington, Ontario. Peace reigns within the O’Connor kingdom. Who am I kidding? There’s only one chief in town and it’s not me or my wife. It’s the little girl with the sort-of Canadian accent who currently slumbers in her ‘Princess Something or Other’ bed dreaming dreams of Amarillo. I presume that’s what she’s dreaming of as she does enough hugging of her pillow to put a certain Tony Christie to shame. It’s either that or a monster, known to you and I as the face of Iain Dowie with seven legs.
Though rare, I sometimes get the “what in the name of fuck am I doing here?” moments. It generally happens in Walmart (a sort of glorified Nutgrove for the uninitiated). It happens when you’re about to buy a mobile phone for $150 and you think it’s a great deal until they ring it in at the till and suddenly it jumps to $200 due to HST. I presume this stands for Horrifically Stupid Tax. You see? It’s not just in Ireland that you get ripped off unawares.
It happens when you get sick of listening to the music on your iPod and you switch on Canadian radio and it’s either Bon Jovi singing about being on a bed of roses as opposed to a bed of nails or Kid Rock telling us that in his youth they were “doing stupid things, really stupid fucking things, singing Sweet Home Alabama all summer long”. Idiot. How I pray at night that he were struck dumb. Switch off and have sweet silence all summer long more like. Homesickness really does bite you at the most innocuous of times.
And then there’s the time difference. I am certain my mates back home have begun to detest me. A few beers on a Friday night on the front porch loosen the tongue at around 10. In your mildly drunken state, you obviously forget it’s 3 in the morning in Dublin. And you text. And then you text some more. “Fuck ‘em” you think to yourself, laughing all evil like. And then you forget that one of them has a two-month old son. But you justify it by reasoning that he’s probably up feeding the boy anyway and you get mildly upset when you get no response to your latest brilliant witterings. And then there’s a thunderstorm and your childlike attention span is diverted. You never pause to think that they’re going to wake up at 8 on a Saturday morning and say to their good lady “what the fuck is that c*** on?” In fairness none of them have rang at 8 in the morning Irish time. But I’d better stop because I’m only inviting it on to myself now Innit?
A small part of my job here at the moment is to recruit a couple of Irish land surveyors for my new firm. For that is what my profession is, in case you didn’t know. I have received a dozen or so CV’s in the past week from Ireland. Must have made a good impression eh? Either that or us Irish lot are cheaper. Probably the latter.
What strikes me, as if I didn’t know already, is that every last one of them hasn’t worked since Summer 2010. Not one. And the ones who are in employment are teetering on the brink of unemployment from what I can garner. It’s fucking depressing.
I listen to Tom Dunne on Newstalk via t’internet of a morning (playback, obviously) and whilst he provides some light relief, when you hear the news bulletins on the hour it would make you want to slit your wrists. How is Ireland going to get out of the state it is in with all the talk of doom and bleeding’ gloom that is overbearing within the media? When my wife and I talk of ‘the current climate’ it is actually to do with 30 degree plus temperatures and whether we should turn the air conditioning on or not. I’m in the yes camp; she’s a definite no, for your information. Makes a nice change from rowing about whether we get a take away or pay the ESB bill, I can tell you. I always pushed for the take-away. Just haven’t grown up have I?
What I say in my responses to the applicants is simple. There are no Irish in Burlington save for me, my wife and child. There are no Irish bars. The Guinness is good in the bars that I have frequented on colder nights before my family arrived over. The local beer, Sleemans is cracking. Toronto is half an hour’s drive away. People get out of an evening and actually do stuff. If you want a barbecue, you can fucking have one without worrying if it’s going to rain. There are outdoor swimming pools that resemble beaches so you can feel like you’re on ollyday in Spain of a weekend. It is piss easy to drive over here – just point the car and accelerate; the insurance is unbelievably and criminally expensive mind you. The Canadian people are welcoming and genuinely good-natured, you don’t feel like it’s fake ‘Have A Nice Day’ like south of the border. Your Dublin accent is somehow exotic. You will miss your Mam and Dad and your sisters and brothers and your extended family (even those who support Leeds) and your mates like hell. But you have Skype; if even just to see them because talking on that thing is nigh on impossible. That’s what the Lord above invented the phone for.
There is no ‘old school tie’ and class structure here – so you can be whoever you want to be and become whatever you want to be once you work hard and prove yourself. And you do work hard. You get ten days paid leave per year starting out. It’s a far cry from pissing off to Turkey for three weeks I can tell you.
But above all, you can talk a good fight a la David Haye but you don’t want to be knocked out. You have to fight a good fight. You have to really want to escape your lot in Ireland and get the fuck out of Dodge. You have to accept that you won’t be in town with your mates, or going to Ireland matches with your mates or ripping the piss out of your brother in your Mam’s kitchen. And that you won’t be doing it for a while either. Whoever sang “I’ll be home for Christmas, but only in my dreams” was spot on. Quit dreaming this is real life baby.
But the good far outweighs the bad. For every low there is a high. I left partly because I couldn’t take any more blows and partly because I looked into the future and did not like what I saw. May I add, I was thrown a wonderful lifeline to stay by a friend of mine, God bless him. But it still wasn’t enough. I apologize for that but you have to do what you have to do. You only get the one life so you’d better make it good. Sure, cats get nine. But who in their right mind wants to spend eternity sitting on a shed roof licking their town-halls?
I was reading the local paper today and I was struck by a quote by an Italian football manager. “This has to be a starting point. Not the end of everything”. Was it Carlo Ancelotti? Giovanni Trappatoni? Fabio Capello? None of the above. No, it was Carolina Morace. Manager of the Canadian Women’s football team...and to think people said she was just a big pair of t*ts....
From me and my High Flying Birds, I bid you a goodnight.
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