Suzanne Harrington: This Gen-Xer is all ready for a roundy reunion in the New Ireland

Suzanne Harrington: "Yup. A school reunion. Forty years, bitches." Pic: Andrew Dunsmore

This weekend I’ll be attending an event involving advanced facial recognition skills.

An evening of face-scanning like an anxious ANPR camera. Surrounded by faces with whom I used to spend all day every day, for years on end, but have now not seen in decades.

A who’s-who of who-used-to-be-who versus who we are now, hopefully matching the two without too many crashing gaffes.

Yup. A school reunion. Forty years, bitches.

Wait, what? FORTY YEARS? I just winded myself with that last sentence. That would make us all…..old?

That can’t be right — I have tickets for Bob Vylan next month. Am I old now? Or do I just have Mounjaro face? A swift glance in the mirror confirms both. Fuck. What if everyone else is dewy-eyed, peachy-skinned, collagen-assisted?

For sure they’ll all be richer — you don’t get rich writing this stuff, believe me — but what if it’s a roomful of perfectly-preserved goddesses, Pilates-immaculate, with handbags that cost more than my bicycle? 

It’s already starting to feel like one of those naked-in-Tesco nightmares, and I’m not even hemmed into my Ryanair seat yet. What would my therapist say? (If I could afford one?)

Maybe the anxiety is being compounded not just by my senior face and junior bank balance, but by the fact that very soon after I left school, I left Ireland.

When I say I haven’t seen people in 40 years, I’m not kidding. 

I have spent just one third of my life — the first bit — on Irish soil, the second third wandering, the third growing Sassanach children on the south coast of England, kids with brown skin and foreign accents who see Ireland both as familiar and alien.

My own accent is no longer sing-songy, but flattened out so that the foreigners can understand me.

I no longer say things like ‘I’m after going to the shop’, because they think you are expressing future intention.

Not that you’ve already been naked in Tesco, but that it’s something you’re planning to do later. 

I learned how to pronounce words like ‘Peugeot’ and ‘buffet’ correctly when my original Irish pronunciation drew foreign laughter. Irish taxi drivers think I’m foreign now.

I’m not, obviously, which is why I’ll be on that budget airline on Saturday. Forty years. When you’re this old, curiosity overrides youthful insecurity. 

A desire to connect, even for an hour or two, to see the faces with whom you spent your teenage years alongside on splintery wooden benches, on hard plastic chairs, inhaling actual chalk dust.

Not understanding isosceles triangles together, or the Modh Connioillach, deeply not caring about ox bow lakes or igneous rocks or potassium permanganate. 

Wishing Peig Sayers had never been born. Comrades in the Leaving Cert trenches, sweating it like it mattered, until we dispersed, chalk particles blown from a blackboard.

Like many Irish women from the Sinead Generation, I am not nostalgic about the past. How could we be? 

Back then, a girl could still be classified as ‘wild’ for simply wishing to be in charge of her own life; we were all still being groomed for compliance.

Not as much as the generation before us, but enough to make our daughters’ eyes widen in disbelief.

We Gen Xers are the transitional generation between Old Ireland and New Ireland.

I like the New Ireland a lot, am excited about the newness of seeing old faces on Saturday night.

Apart from one thing. 

Will we recognise each other? Will there be name badges? 

In large print?