My primary-school atlas contained two Amazing Facts, both rain-related. 1) August is Ireland's wettest month (or it was in the 1970s). 2) North Co Dublin is our driest region. Until then, I had never been conscious of north Dublin - where I lived - as a distinct entity, but at that moment I felt a small surge of pride in the non-wetness of my locale, and my northsider identity was born.
In the years that followed, that innocent pride was replaced by a more cynical sense of place, whereby northside meant simply non-southside. "The southside", to my friends and me, was a vague territory where some people's cousins lived, all of them mollycoddled children with affected enunciation who ate funny food.
Its profile improved in our teenage years. By attending school-discos on both sides of the Liffey, we concluded that the girls of Dublin 4 were better-looking, more interested in your Inter Cert results (the hot topic of conversation), and more likely to get off with you than their northside counterparts. And if we had less rain, how come they had better tans?
Gradually, the pub-joke stereotypes were blown away by first-hand knowledge. Getting to know a young woman from the rolling hills of Mount Merrion in the early 1990s, I was subjected to regular north-south culture shocks. Such as discovering that the clothes she was wearing were worth more than my entire wardrobe, including the actual wardrobe. Seeing her take a taxi when there were lots of perfectly good buses around. Driving to the airport and learning that this was her first non-cinematic encounter with Ballymun. (I wasn't exactly a regular visitor myself, but I shut up about that.)
We married eventually, and I whisked her back to live on the northside. Three years into this Jemima Khan existence, she asked what I thought about moving south. Thinking that she was describing a half-worked-out idea for a reality TV show, I said it sounded like a laugh. And before you could say "Ross O'Carroll-Kelly", there was a For Sale sign in the garden. I left the familiar charms of Dublin 7 for the uncharted waters of Blackrock-sur-mer.
As we left, I thought of the slightly unkind term given to the many southsiders who have moved north in recent years (the "Dalkey Desperado" is a person who has been priced out of their native southern suburb, yet still shops in the Merrion Centre, banks in Killiney and spends Friday nights in Finnegans of Dalkey, before taking a cab home to Phibsboro). As a dislocated migrant myself, I felt their pain.
I realised we weren't in Cabra anymore, Toto, when we put all the furniture from the old house into the new one, and found there was no room left for us. No matter. A spot of Liposuction and we'd fit right in.
Culture shock number two was the reaction when people heard where I lived. "Ooooh Bleckrawk. Vurry ni-ice." At first, when telling people my address, I'd have to suppress the involuntary weird smirk which crept across my face, not because I felt smug about being a nouveau south-sider but because I thought people thought I did. So I'd add "in a cottage", to disabuse them of the notion that I might live in a multi-acre, inherited property with its own boathouse. Drumcondra would have been so much easier.
I subsequently found that giving the street name avoided some of these problems. St Vincent's Park is, as one friend put it, "a very northside-sounding address". The saintly appellation is shorthand for a humble history, modest houses, and general dissimilarity to Waltham Terrace, Avoca Avenue etc. It's like a northside enclave.
From within the comfort zone of this Little Northside, I could observe the wider southside, but just what the two terms meant was no clearer to me than when I was a child. (How baffling it must be for non-Dubliners.) "Southside" seems to refer primarily to Dublin 4 and the plush suburbs to its west and south. North Dublin is comparatively vast, but the "northside" tag is most often applied to the inner suburbs. In the middle-class outer districts, it means that you occasionally adopt a bogus salt-of-the-earth accent to discuss "the gee-gees" and say things like: "Far from mochaccino lattes we was rared". It's the Castleknock Commoner phenomenon.
But just when I had decided the whole distinction was rubbish, I began flicking through the Golden Pages and counting the art galleries. Northside 12. Southside 70. Then licensed restaurants. Northside 125. Southside 478. Embassies: Northside 3. Southside 60. Butler's Pantries: Northside 1. Southside 5. Cosmetic surgeries: Northside 3. Southside 21. Clearly, south Dublin has more luxury amenities, and (it seems safe to extrapolate) more money to spend on them.
I'd like to think that this rarefied milieu has had no effect on my character and, two years into the experiment, I consider myself a mere associate member of Club Southside. My first lunch in Cavistons was only the other week. I haven't had one Botox session, although maybe next birthday. Plus, I still do the Castleknock Commoner thing after about two pints. But only someone with an unassailably pure value system (the Dalai Lama, maybe) could say for sure that their surroundings won't change them. And I did buy a painting from a gallery recently. Wonder if it was like this for Bono.
