Colm O'Regan: I'm in Dublin as long as I'm in Cork — I worry my Corkness will fade

Irish Examiner columnist, writer and comedian Colm O'Regan.

It’s official. I am in Dublin for as long as I was in Cork. 22 years in each.

Maybe not to the exact day but roughly, give or take a J1, a few months throwing shapes at being a labourer in London and a few more months in other countries pretending to know about computers.

In November 2000, my friend Ed drove me up so I could find a place to rent in Dublin.

Gather round children and I’ll tell you about the old days. We parked at Newlands Cross (then a crossroads with traffic lights), just beyond the asteroid belt of the Mad Cow Roundabout. I bought what we used to call a newspaper.

I rang a thing called a landline and within two hours I had a place to stay.

That’s the sort of frictionless living we used to enjoy before we got all modern and had to camp on the pavement to be in with a shot of living in a hot press.

Over the years, letters readdressed in my mother’s flawless cursive handwriting — forged in the discipline of the 40s — followed me from Non-Descript Suburb to Apartment Near A Happening Place to You Can Rent Here But Never Buy to Negative Equity For A Good While Home.

How did 22 years pass? How have I let this happen? Some flaw in my character? Not Cork enough? Not enough work for ‘my kind’ in Cork?

A weird desire to live in a city that has three rivers, two canals but no opera house?

I worry will my Corkness fade. Like Marty McFly in Back to the Future when he starts to fade from the family photo when it looks like there’s a danger his own mother might want to shift him?

Do I wait for an emergency to rectify it? The GAA allegiances of the next generation is a wake-up call. Luckily my two girls don’t want Dublin jerseys yet.

Their sporting awakening coincided with a dip in Dublin football’s form and Dublin’s hurlers provide the kind of trail of tears that they can definitely get at their ancestral homes in Cork and Wexford.

And while we would be very much of the opinion that outmoded definitions of gender are limiting and damaging, in GAA terms, ‘blue is a boy’s colour.’

But if my children announce that they want us to “rant a hice in Wast Quirke” then it would be a time for an intervention.

They would be whisked back to Dripsey and injected with child portions of non-alcoholic Beamish and forced to listen to the short stories of Frank O’Connor on a gramophone before you could say “For many years, the County Hall was the tallest building in Ireland.”

It’s one subtle clue to how Cork you are, how you react to being told by someone how much they LOVE west Cork. Dubs go on about West Cork as if it’s the whole point of Cork.

And you might be polite and say “yeah West Cork is so big that the halfway point of a journey from Ailihies to Dublin is still in County Cork” but inwardly you’re fuming that they’ve ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA ABOUT RYLANE OR BANTEER OR ROCKCHAPEL OR CONNA.

That’s how I know I’m still Cork enough. I’m protective of every bit of it. The roundabout outside Midleton that truth be told happens a little too suddenly after the dual carriageway, that narrow bit in Sunday’s Well where you don’t know if you should pull in or just drive and to hell with people in the opposite direction or just Nad in general.

I’m ok for the moment. But I need to spend more time in Cork to top up. Yes, that would be bleedin' deadly…

Oh my God… What’s happening to me?