Homesickness does strange things to a man. My partner has spent his first three weeks in Australia with an uninterrupted view of the Pacific Ocean. He can watch whales go past the kitchen window and not have to pause his spud peeling to witness their majestic annual migration from Antarctica up to warmer waters to have their babies.
Every afternoon, from the comfort of his private balcony, he watches the kind of pink and orange sunsets that make atheists flirt with the possible existence of God. “It’s all right, I guess,” he says, shrugging his shoulders as if it was a novelty tea towel with a cat wearing sunglasses I was showing him, instead of ocean frontage on one of the world’s prettiest coastlines.
It’s not because he’s an absolute ingrate. It’s because, as good as the panorama is and as many millions as it would take to buy it normally, it’s not the view his heart desires, which is the back of big Irish heads bobbing up and down in front of a pub telly while the All-Ireland final is on.
I try not to take this personally. If a double-jointed, naked supermodel who owned a brewery walked in front of him while he was watching the GAA, he would tell her to move. “You’d make a better door than a window. Now sit down there, Helena Christensen, and have a sandwich,” he would say, offering her the good armchair before explaining the advanced mark rule to Emily Ratajkowski. Just kidding, Emily spent her childhood summers in Cork – she probably already knows it.
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His dual love for Gaelic football and his county saw him take a three-hour round trip by train alone to the closest “actual” Irish pub that was showing the Galway v Donegal semi-final in the early hours of the morning. He sat, stone-cold sober, patiently drinking Red Bulls, and waiting for the DJ to stop and for the dodgy RTÉ stream to fill the dance floor with his favourite kind of music – GAA match commentary. I wasn’t worried about him being alone. He was wearing his lucky but ugly Galway Official GAA bucket hat, which handily doubles as contraception.
The GAA is a shortcut to belonging - especially when you’re far from home
At various points in our relationship, I have wondered if it would just be easier if he were having a normal affair. If I only had to share him with one or even two women, they wouldn’t institute a drinking ban. We could go on summer holidays when it was actually summer instead of whenever the championship is over. We would have a shared Google calendar. They would be very reasonable about our timeshare arrangement, unlike the GAA, which runs for 13 months of the year because it needs not one but two whole competitions to find out who is the best team.
I take comfort knowing that my relationship is just like Princess Diana’s in that there are three of us in it and it is very crowded between me, my partner and the GAA. This is not part of my culture. My interest in being a GAA wag dropped the minute I found out it was an unpaid position and involved getting a stiff bum on cold seats in the rain. I ask annoying questions such as “why do they make the shorts so white if players end up getting them muddy every game? Are they sponsored by Vanish Gold? Do they wash their own shorts? Because they’d have to soak them for a good few hours.”
I just don’t get it. Nor should I have to, because life is too short to pretend to like a sport for the sake of a man. Plus, at the risk of sounding like the far right, that’s what my partner gets for shifting a foreigner instead of sticking with his own kind: a woman thoroughly uninterested in GAA, the sport he once called the “number one love” in his life in an article. While we were together.
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But for once I put my one-sided rivalry aside because this was not about the All-Ireland final, this was about missing home. “What if this is a once-in-a-lifetime event and Galway never makes the final again and I miss it?” he asked – even though this once-in-a-lifetime event last happened just two years ago. He was not thinking of Galway. He was thinking of his brother, dad, cousins and uncles, who he longed to watch the game with. The GAA is a conduit for community. It’s a shortcut to belonging, to remembering who you are and where you come from – especially when you’re far from home.
Which is why my Australian dad has suddenly become a self-declared Galwegian and is texting my partner links to RTÉ articles about Pádraic Joyce. And why I’ll be in a pub wearing an ugly bucket hat at 2am next week, watching my partner’s mistress on telly.