An English person in Ireland speaks with eight centuries of history gesticulating over her shoulder
. Residencies can be odd; the premise sounds luxurious – nothing to do except write your book – but for exactly that reason, they can be uncomfortable. You’re there for a job of work. There are no more excuses: face the page and write. I was finishing a novel, which is easier than starting one, and I’d been aching to go back to it through a busy time at work, so the writing part was difficult only in a rewarding way.
I did miss Ireland. I like a chat. I like people. I like stories. I felt reproached by the Swedish writer’s silence, like a silly woman who doesn’t know when to shut up. I recognised that I had been unwittingly intrusive, probably seemed as rude to him as he did to me.
I know that Irish indirectness is born of precisely that history. I’m a writer, of course I enjoy dances with words, but the delicacy of Irish conversational dancing still sometimes makes me feel a bit Nordic, a bit Swedish, as if there’s some west-east spectrum of European light-footedness in speech, from the west of Ireland through my part of England all the way to Russia.
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