"Youse are from the country, den?" remarked the woman on overhearing me talking to my young daughter in the GP's waiting room in Phibsboro.
"I am," I answered after a moment's hesitation. It wasn't how I thought of myself. I didn't wake in the morning and think, "Ah, here I am, a country person living in Dublin. What country-person things shall I do today?" But technically, she was correct. I am from "The Country". I am a culchie, or at least I am one in Dublin. No matter that I hail from the country's second city or that I've lived abroad in a city several times the size of our capital.
I noticed the woman was staring at me. I looked at her expectantly.
"Went to Galway once for a weekend," she finally announced.
"And you're telling me this because. . .?" I might have asked. What did she want? The Ernest Shackleton Award for Exploration into Uncharted Territory? But she was just being friendly. Why should I take umbrage just because she shared a idiosyncrasy common
among Dubliners - that of dividing the world into three: Dublin, The Country and Foreign?
It made sense that she'd think that I - with still a hint of Cork in my voice - would be interested in how she followed a national route - the N6 - far beyond the Liffey Valley Shopping Centre to its ultimate destination.
That woman was the first to put the question to me on hearing my accent that day in the GP's surgery soon after I moved to Dublin; but there have been many others in the couple of years since. Sometimes I wonder what image is conjured up in their minds when they think of The Country. Do they visualise a homogenous world of green fields, farmhouses, cottages and cows? Do those who've never been there know that there are cities in "The Country" - yes, cities - with flyovers, roundabouts, and Marks and Spencers? Or do they give it any thought at all?
Just as I never regarded myself as a country person before coming to live in Dublin, neither had I any affinity with people from counties other than my own. But the past couple of summers have changed all that, and the cause of this change is the hurling and football championships.
Now my knowledge of our national sports is limited. I know football involves a football and hurling involves hurleys and a sliotar, and that's more than I care to know. That practically half the pages of our nation's newspapers are taken up with sports baffles me, but not as much as the fact that people appear to read them.
So it's not the sporting aspect of these sporting fixtures that interests me. What interests me is how, Sunday after Sunday, they draw my fellow culchies "up from the country" (be they coming from the north, south, east or west).
When I look out my window I see them. All sorts. I see families gathered around the open boots of parked cars on the side of our street, drinking from flasks and eating sandwiches prepared at the crack of dawn in a kitchen many miles away. I see bunches of young men talking in their loud country accents, commanding the breadth of the pavement. I see the freckled, red-haired son running on ahead, giddy with excitement; the father in the middle, anxious for the three generations to have a day to remember; the stooped grandfather bringing up the rear, slower now than when he first started coming up for the match. And I see the middle-aged couple, walking along, holding hands, both in denims and wine-coloured Westmeath jerseys with Greville Arms Hotel emblazoned across her ample breasts and his skinny torso.
The orange-and-white of Armagh. The green of Fermanagh. The black and amber of Kilkenny. Morgan Fuels. Tracey Concrete. Avonmore.
I see them crowding around the menu board by the door of the local café. "Will we chance it?" "Sure, we might as well give it a go." In they pour.
"How many sausages are in the Big Breakfast?" "Does toast come with it?" The foreign waitress looks baffled.
Once served, they stand in the middle of the aisle, craning necks in search of seats. "Lads, over here! There's room over here! You don't mind if we squash in beside you?" The Dubliner, wishing now he'd stayed at home for breakfast, does mind, but what can he do?
I see them a couple of hours later, spilling on to the footpaths outside the pubs - the nearer to Croke Park, the bigger the crowd. I see them as they start making their way to the stadium, little rivulets joining up from every street, getting thicker and stronger.
"Tickets!" "Tickets!" "Hats, flags and scarves!" The atmosphere is electric, like a carnival. I almost want to go to the match too but I remind myself that's the one part of this whole phenomenon I find boring.
I may not ever take my place in the Hogan or the Cusack stands but you just might see a great big red-and-white flag flapping from a window in Phibsboro some Sunday this summer. And sure, if you do, why don't you drop in? Isn't that the way we do things in the country? And on those days, Dublin's north inner city is The Country.
"C'mon, ya boy!"