A woman who takes her children from Dublin to a family house by the sea in Co Down for their summer holidays said to me the thing they like most is that Northern Ireland is different. The postboxes are different, and the road-signs are different, and the currency is different.
Anybody can play Spot the Difference. Why are 18 eggs in Dunnes Stores in Belfast 49p and in Dublin 79p? Why is motor-bike racing so much more popular in the north than in the south? Is the definition of a "good" person different in the different cultures?
There's an ad in my local Belfast free-sheet, for instance, for a candidate in the present Assembly election. " `Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock.' Matt 7 v 24. For an Independent, Evangelical and Unfettered voice in the Assembly Vote Billy Dickson No. 1 for South Belfast. Unionist (Independent and Evangelical)." How differently all that would have to be put, south of the Border.
"It's a nice place to look at," an acquaintance said, about the place she comes from, "But the Catholics are kept out of everything."
YOU become conscious of relief when you're doing something that's not different. When you're somewhere where neither Protestant nor Catholic is perceived to be at an advantage. Such an event and a place was a reading, in the pub that is upstairs over the Crown pub in Belfast.
What mattered there was not the politically-loaded cultural heritage, but the culture from which the readings were coming, which was the home, international culture of everybody in the crowded room. It's true that politics never goes away. A man started talking about the problems the Northern Assembly will face.
I said I didn't think there was much point in discussing the Assembly in the abstract: it would invent itself as it discovered what it had to do. "But," he began, "I've gone through the agreement carefully, and I think it says there . . ." Then the shushing from the crowd in front of us reached us, and it was time to climb up on a high stool and find a drink. We were entering the arena where we are all one.
The crowd was there to hear Pat McCabe, who wrote The Butcher Boy, and, recently, Breakfast on Pluto, read from his work - the funny and touching readings being accompanied by the Dublin band Jack L. The whole occasion was as "cross-Border" as you can get.
Pat McCabe would be a north-south and an east-west institution if anarchists could be institutions. It helps that he comes from Clones, a southern town that looked naturally to the north until the Troubles came and the roads were blown up. If there's a non- or even anti-political part of Ireland it is in those imploded towns and villages along the Border where strangers never pass through. And there is none of the stuff of conventional politics in the imagination of a creator such as Pat McCabe.
He read from The Dead School. A shy head teacher, after the exciting day when his boys are in the choral championship, has a few little whiskies with the head priest and later, in bed, he holds his wife close. He says over and over to her, "macushla", "macushla".
When Pat had finished the lovely passage, Jack L. sang John McCormack's Macushla. A good few of the fashionable young things in the audience probably never heard the song before. But everybody knew the truth of the human feelings the passage evoked.
The pub we were in was a mock-up of an old pub, the "old" bits spanking new, done recently, after a bomb next door started a fire. Outside, in front of the Europa, the flags of the EU and Japan flutter beside the Union Jack.
They're there for decoration, not territorial assertion. Who cares? What is place? The cosmopolitan McCabe has given this performance in London and Dublin, and might well give it in Los Angeles the next time he's there for the Oscars. The worlds he visits with his listeners - the worlds he invented - are as real as the real place outside. To most of the people in the pub - McCabe fans - his places are territories as familiar as their own streets.
He read a sad and hilarious passage about a boy's adoration for a young girl encountered at a carnival, whom he woos in "eighty or ninety" letters and finally confronts in the chip-shop in Cavan town. "What about us?" the boy tries to shout over Gary Glitter on the jukebox.
McCabe's love-objects blow into their Fanta bottles and ask for fags and dream of Julios and Clints and beach houses, while desperate teenage males from out the road yearn for the girls and jostle with their mates roaring "Hould me back, boys! Hould me back!" A girl standing near me in the pub said, "I'm English. I never heard of Cavan. But I don't need to. There's a Cavan everywhere . . ."
There was an interval half-way through the reading. Behind me somebody was talking about the undescribed lives being lived in the Northern Ireland that is neither town or country - in the anonymous housing estates that now cover what was farmland on the outskirts of Northern Ireland's towns.
The dismembered body of a pregnant 17year-old was found buried under a house in such an estate. Somebody else was having a conversation about drugs. "Tens of thousands of ecstasy tablets gone through," I heard, "and only two deaths."
Pat McCabe started reading again - a piece about the young hero " 'atin' " acid at training college in Dublin, and spending his days staring at the floorboards and watching bits of his hand get up and walk about. He read about Francie finding out his mother has killed herself. Real life and fiction merged.
Everybody followed the references that tumble from McCabe. The names of bands, groups, film stars, singers, places, advertising slogans: Led Zeppelin; "Why Go Bald?" A Mother's Love's a Blessing. Jack L. sang a Jacques Brel song. Then he sang I like Girls and I like Boys and everybody sang along. Outside, respectable-looking people were beginning to come out of The Sleeping Beauty in the Opera House to catch their Ulsterbuses home.
In the pub, everybody effortlessly followed Pat McCabe's trackings of heartbreak. Fighting about an Assembly seemed grotesquely far away from what makes life real. At last, difference had quite melted away. There was popular music, and the human heart, and words. Shared.