BEING ENGLISH IN IRELAND:The real surprise is that Irish people are friendly, despite our shared history The Irish definition of time would have confounded Einstein, let alone someone from a punctual neighbouring country
A VISIT from the queen sends my lot running for the best china and your lot levering up the floorboards for that old stash of Kalashnikovs. At least, that is what I would have suspected shortly after I arrived in Dublin in 1999, just a year after the Belfast Agreement had been signed.
I was full of blasé confidence that everyone was going to love me and no one would want to blow me up. I was half right in that no one exactly wanted to blow me up, at least not on first sight. Or at least no one told me if they did.
It didn't take long to realise that the British were not loved universally, however. The hints started almost as soon as I had secured my charming little one-bedroom place, with my own private bathroom just down the hallway, in Rathmines.
There was the friend of a friend who quietly extolled the virtues of poitín and encouraged me to drink plenty of it. There was the willingness of total strangers to give me Irish history lessons whenever the vaguest opportunity came up.
"Excuse me, could you direct me to the General Post Office?"
"It's the big building covered in bullet marks from the 1916 Easter Rising when our brave soldiers fought the English for our independence and started to emerge from 800 years of oppression," I was told.
There was the time a work colleague, who was giving me a lift, gleefully told me about his friend. This man, who lived and worked in the city centre, had a chip the size of a diseased baked potato on his shoulder. Whenever someone with an English accent asked directions to Temple Bar, he would direct them to walk all the way down to the quays, turn right towards the harbour, and keep going till they got back to England. (Stop smiling. It's only a little bit funny)
Perhaps most poignant was when I was working on a current affairs radio programme. One slow news day, the TV news focused on a ceremony where the queen was giving medals to members of the RUC for bravery.
Two of my colleagues, mostly friendly and kindly people (though beset with the typical bizarre eccentricities of journalism), became agitated. They called her "your queen" as if I had voted for her, and got furious with me, eventually walking out of the office.
There is a kind of displacement that comes with living in a country in Europe that is not largely shaped by what happened in the second World War. That time is referred to here as "the Emergency", which makes it sound like the rest of Europe was battling over a bathroom as if it were a large family with one toilet.
As the decade progressed and the Irish got wealthier, no one seemed to mind as much about the past. They were more likely to be incensed at the cost of lawyers and new fashions for teenagers. Whole newspaper spreads were devoted to the shocking extravagance of a Juicy Couture tracksuit, a Prada bag and a tribunal. "But are we happier?" countless newspaper headlines asked. "Yes you are," answered several global surveys, which regularly placed Ireland near the top of league tables for happiness.
There were, of course, huge upsides to life in Ireland. The Irish definition of time would have confounded Albert Einstein, let alone someone from the more punctual neighbouring country. For a person in her twenties, fond of a lie-in, the late morning starts and late night pub sessions were preferable to London's early morning starts and long working days.
The more odium Anglo-Irish history conferred on me, the more surprising it was that most Irish people were pleasant and friendly towards me.
It got to the point where I was so much a member of the tribe that the odd friend would forget there was a Brit in their midst.
"What a lovely name," I once said to a colleague. "I think it's English," she said, screwing up her face as if the word "English" were actually "dog shit". As it happens, the name was Welsh, but who's counting?
The most upsetting moment probably came when a good friend described how she grew up in Northern Ireland, with young British army cadets training their rifles on her as she walked to school.
As someone who has spent 11 years in Ireland, feeling taken to its heart though only like a mistrusted cousin, I am delighted to see the planned route for the queen. The Garden of Remembrance and Croke Park should be the first places she visits. Those locations represent beginnings and endings in the long history of Britain's historical wrongdoing in Ireland.
Judging from the interest Irish people took in the recent royal wedding, the crowds for the queen may be big. No doubt the security forces will take no chances.
But if your view is obscured by an Englishwoman struggling for a better look, please don't advise her to walk towards the quays and keep going until she gets to England.
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