A love letter to home: 'Cork does not suit sun, it’s a rainy city!'

The rain always uproots ghosts from the bedrock of this city. Memories are laid on thicker in the wetness of the river’s floodplains.

In sunshine, like we have had in abundance this week, Cork feels a bit awkward, like it doesn’t know what to make of itself. Fellas are around the place topless as soon as the temperature rises anything over 15 degrees.

The warmth doesn’t suit the place and the people of Cork don’t adjust well to the sun at all. We complain of the heat when it’s here and we complain when it isn’t here just the same.

Like it or not, the city wears rain better than anything else. It gives the place its grit, its character. The virtues of the city are to be found in the rain. The river reflects its turbulent history during vicious downpours.

You could imagine aul’ Michael Collins on the streets of a horribly wet Cork city, but you wouldn’t be able to imagine the man about the place with the calves out enjoying the good weather. Not a hope.

With a faint mist falling like white noise from the fog above... It is this uniquely bland way in which I always recall home. Its humidity pairing perfectly with the cooling spray.

Despite what its inhabitants might otherwise believe, the city wears rain the best. It draws out the history of the place better than anything. Every time I find myself on the slippery wet pavements of Grand Parade or become a drowned rat on Oliver Plunkett Street, I can feel the ghosts of our terrific history alongside me, and it’s a comfort to be able to have that connection at all.

But I haven’t always felt this way. I think love for Cork is something I grew into. There was a time when I felt this place was too small for me. The shape of the place constricted my body, made it difficult to move. I was afraid to grow anymore for fear of it becoming even smaller again.

I have a friend named Jason. He’s an artist and he loves Cork. He does these incredible illustrations of iconic characters peppered around Cork. One time I asked him if he’d do the same thing for other cities, Dublin or Galway, and he looked at me like I had two heads.

“Why would I do that?”

“To expand your business, make more money?”

“I’ve no interest. They’re not Cork,” he said. And he wasn’t joking. He loved Cork and Cork alone.

So I left, didn’t I? Fled for Spanish shores. Like so many of us do. When I told Jason, he couldn’t believe I’d want to live anywhere but Cork. He was genuinely hurt by my decision to live elsewhere.

I felt I might curate a better life somewhere else. I could be myself, or someone else, somewhere else. Despite what we here in Cork tend to believe, this city wasn’t the centre of the universe. At least not to everyone who exists outside of it.

And for a while it felt exhilarating. Being out in the world. I felt adventurous, grown-up even. I became the type of Irish person who was more than their Irishness - in other words, I became a relentless p***k, self-satisfied every time I came home, pinching the metaphorical cheeks of Cork, commenting on how small it was, how cute it was, diminishing our city, betraying it by thinking it less of a place than cities in other countries.

But then, novelty is transient. It wears off. What once was new becomes normal. The extraordinary becomes regular.

By the time I had settled into the rhythms of Spain, something peculiar started happening. I started to view home from afar and admire it. I started taking Irish lessons online, opting to improve my mother tongue over Spanish. A sort of patriotic pride welled inside of me, and my Irish identity took a more prominent position in my personality.

But more specific than this, I began to miss Cork. And through the transitive properties of missing something, I became grateful for my home in a way I never had before. I missed that within Cork there are real opportunities for silence. Silence always felt like the absence of something before, but having lived in a city that stretched on for all directions for miles, with millions of people piled around me, I realised I missed silence, the reprieve of it, because you can’t get it in Barcelona.

I missed walking down Patrick Street or Oliver Plunkett Street with the knowledge there was a 90% chance I’d bump into someone I know. I missed stout, well-poured Beamish. I missed pubs that were just pubs and not Irish pubs. I missed hearing the reverberations of the Echo Boy haunting the city, rain or shine. I missed how everyone felt familiar, even if you never knew them, how people just say hello to each other because they’re walking past each other and that should be more than enough reason to say hello.

All of these things and more I missed. It swelled inside of me like a murmuration of starlings at the end of a brief summer, taking on the shape of love, love I always had but often took for granted for having been too close to this place before.

And I realised, one Friday evening in London, not so long ago, that not everyone is lucky enough to be born at home. That some people spend their entire lives searching for home. That home is not guaranteed, that home is a privilege those of us who have it carry.

And I realised then, too, that I was born at home. Which, when you think about it, is incredibly unlikely. But there I was, in London, realising that I was born in my home, that I had lived in my home for most of my life, and that it took me moving away from it to realise what it was, and how much it means to me.

Daragh Fleming’s new collection of stories, A Brief Inhalation, published by Broken Sleep Books, is out now.