As soon as I said it, I knew what I'd just done and I didn't like it. There were two weddings on last weekend and, as both couples had been together since college days, there were a good few people home for the occasion, mostly from London, some from New York and San Francisco. To kick off the weekend, I had lunch with two English friends with whom I had been at Trinity for four years but who now live in London. We keep in touch by e-mail and by phone and both have been back to Dublin fairly regularly - they know the place just as well as I do. So why, oh why did I come out with the statement: "Oh yes, we do know how to cook on this side of the water, too, you know," when one of them complimented the menu in the restaurant, which had opened since his last visit?
Luckily, said friend knows me well enough to just turn around and call for some salt and vinegar to put on the large pile of chips on my shoulder, while I explained that I was just exercising the Irish right to be chippy, in case I ever needed it and found it wasn't working from lack of practice. Still it was a rather chilling moment.
Chippiness has always been the traditional reaction of the Irish when dealing with the returned emigrant - any suggestion that an adopted country might be superior to Ireland in some way was met with an over-the-top defence that started something along the lines of "Well, the streets might well be paved with gold but the tricky thing about gold is . . ."
In order to avoid it, an unspoken set of rules was drawn up that I think they handed out with those pink immigration cards on returning flights. If you ticked all the right boxes and followed all the correct conversational patterns, you got a decent welcome home.
Traditionally, this privilege was only conferred if you promised to keep absolutely mum about your life in your chosen new home - no talk about the longer drinking hours, the 900 types of coffee or the time you met Madonna in a bar in Sausalito. You had to look a bit vague and put upon and mutter something about how you supposed your job as a supermodel/ad exec/film director was "alright", with the obvious implications that you would far rather be waitressing in Dunmore East if it meant you could live in Ireland.
As for those who stayed on at home, the return of old friends or family who were working abroad also gave certain rights and privileges. You were fully entitled to talk at length about what a whale of a time you have all been having, how every bouncer in every club called you brother and how petrol was now free, rashers good for you, and romance easy.
Both emigrant and resident knew that this was all a load of cobblers, but as long as both parties kept up the pretence that Ireland was the font of all good times, peace reigned and nobody could be accused of throwing their weight around.
But, as more and more people of my generation left Ireland purely out of choice, I rather arrogantly presumed that the need to pretend that Ireland was the epicentre of the world had disappeared. Ireland has really become a good place to live for a lot of us; we have presumably chosen to live here and it should be perfectly easy to place ourselves alongside friends who live in other cosmopolitan cities and not feel bad or inferior.
However, the flood of old friends back into the country last weekend showed that I'd been a little naive. The menu incident was just the first of a number of occasions when I found myself acting like the very loud child in the "our news" session every morning at national school: "Miss, Miss, we were all out last weekend and we didn't get in until six in the morning, so we didn't, and Bono was there and I ate cocaine sandwiches in the bath and . . ."
To give them their due, those who had flown in from London, New York and so on either didn't notice the rules of engagement or pretended not to, and managed to tread the right line between complimenting new developments in Dublin and criticising others. It's still their city, after all, and presumably they know darn well that it has as much going for it, if in different ways, as their adopted homes have.
YET it strikes me that, while my own display of childishness is probably something to do with a competitive streak that I only know I possess because I put so much time into proving that I am the most uncompetitive person in the world, it also has its counterpart in our own national need to talk about how groovy and booming Ireland is now.
Whether it's true or not is quite another question, and the more news we hear of institutionalised child abuse, casual incidents of racism and political corruption, the more you'd begin to wonder. But our need to constantly talk of how great and cosmopolitan we are, of how much we're changing and of how everybody in the world envies our economy and our night life, begins to seem awfully like a brand new form of chippiness.
Defensiveness about how gloomy Ireland was has been replaced by bumptiousness about how great Ireland is - yet until we stop talking up our own country in relation to everybody else's it seems unlikely that we will ever really accept that we are their equals, no more no less. The fact is that until we stop talking about how cool we all are, we won't really be cool at all.