I didn’t expect to be back so soon. When our 12 months in Australia were up, we planned to fly straight to San Francisco, where my husband was due to start a new job in August. It would be easier that way, we told ourselves. Cleaner. Less opportunity for tears and goodbyes and newborn babies screaming their way across the Atlantic. We would come back when we were settled, when we had stories to tell about homes found and new friends made.
Life, inevitably, had other plans. The Californian sun had barely warmed our cheeks when we got the phone call every ex-pat says they dread, even if they don’t actually allow themselves to believe it will ever come.
My mother-in-law had taken ill, the voice on the other end said gently, and we might want to make plans to come home. So we did. Two weeks after we had arrived, we found ourselves on the road back to the airport.
Some things are depressingly familiar. Everyone is still talking about property. The traffic layout on Stephen’s Green has changed – again. The streets are just as filthy. There are more empty shops.
But other things, good things, have crept up on us and filled us with gratitude for a particular quality of the Irish that we never noticed before, or maybe we just needed to step back to see it clearly. It is more than kindness, and ‘empathy’ doesn’t do it justice either. It is best described as a kind of grace.
We saw it in the Belfast woman at the airport who, when she discovered that the airline was refusing to seat us alongside our children on an overnight flight, efficiently rearranged all the other passengers around us.
We saw it in the musician who had never met my mother-in-law but who cried at her funeral, because she could see how greatly she was loved, and how deeply she would be missed. We saw it in the faces of the strangers who blessed themselves as her coffin passed. We saw it in the gestures of friends who offered black coats and babysitting and beds and Moses baskets, or who gave up evenings and afternoons to be with us, and who never once said, “That’s what you get for leaving”.
Californians might be – rightly – known for their friendliness, and Australians for their sense of fun and their laidback approach to life. The Irish have something that is quieter and less showy, an attribute you might not be able to name, but which you’ll recognise if you ever encounter. Grace.
It doesn’t get a lot of press, but it’s one of the things we do best.
If I had been bothered to set up an out-of-office autoreply for the last three months, it would have read something like: “I’m currently out of the office, working my way through the Holmes and Rahe scale of the 43 most stressful life events. I expect to return when my blood pressure hits 160.”
I haven’t yet been imprisoned or divorced – of course, there’s still time – but our little family of five has ticked off 12 of the other events on the list in the last three months, including a baby and a bereavement, new houses, jobs, schools and a new continent.
Do you fancy a piece of my start-up with your latte?
Silicon Valley – ‘the valley’ or ‘the Bay Area’, but never ‘San Fran’ or ‘Cisco’ to the locals – where we pitched up a few weeks ago, 12 suitcases and three children in tow, is a place where the air is thick with pot smoke and opportunity.
Everyone, even the homeless guys you see pushing their carefully folded belongings around in shopping trolleys, wears a T-shirt that says something like ‘Disruptive Tech Weekend Vancouver 2014’. If every second person you meet in LA is an aspiring actor, then everyone in San Francisco – the guy in the phone shop; the prospective landlord – has a start-up they want to sell you along with your bagel or your mobile phone package. It is another gold rush, by turns bewildering, exhilarating and faintly terrifying. By the time you read this, we will have landed there for the second time. I’ll keep you posted.
Take a walk on the Wilde side
Oscar Wilde would, you suspect, have enjoyed the fact that he is among the first 20 famous LGBT people to be featured in San Francisco's new "Rainbow Walk", a hall of fame and unfortunate typos on Castro Street.
Wilde’s plate credits him with a “bitting wit”, while Christine Jorgensen, the first widely known person known to have sex reassignment surgery, is described as “trangendered”. No doubt the authorities will be chalking it up to experience – which, as Wilde said, is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.