Moving out means shaking off your earlier life

MY mother says: “Colm, there’s a letter here for you”. For me? At this address? When you move out of home, you gradually shake off the traces of the first phase of your life.

Look at an Irish mother’s address book: her children’s path through life, and the economic health of the country, are traced out simply and succinctly. The first tentative steps towards living somewhere with a postcode, the odd C/O here and there.

As the economy declined, many mothers’ address books contained the despot’s name that adorned the ‘Towers’ that their child lived in while making big money out in the Middle East.