Being slagged in public is the greatest honour !

I’ve been lucky enough to live in many English speaking countries, yet the friendships I’ve forged while living in Ireland are matched only by those struck in the heat of my London youth.

Whether from Australia, America, my native England or adopted Ireland, all my friends are capable of slagging. They have to be. What’s the use of investing all that time and trust in someone if you can’t make them laugh by tearing them to pieces?

Nobody personifies the Irish art of slagging better than my excellent friend The Body. Hanging his humour on the Continental Divide between absurdity and wisdom, there’s a dryness to his wit that’s akin to having emery paper dragged across your private bits. His slaggings hurt, make you think, then laugh self-deprecatingly and on the way they teach you something about yourself.

To slag is to attack with affection, and it only really works when reciprocated. In my experience, English and Irish people enjoy and rely on slagging more than any from other nations. At risk of churning the stomachs of the Shinner-inclined amongst you, I think it’s part of our collective culture.

Our differences are mostly the result of our histories, because the humans standing in Irish and English fields and cities are not so very different: aggressive; witty; warriors who have survived invasion, we need to know we can bluster and barrage our way through friendships, free from fear of offending.

Indeed, as an Englishman living in the West of Ireland, I’ve been the victim of fairly hysterical and frequently historical Irish slagging for over two decades now, and when it has been delivered well, I’ve enjoyed it.

Slagging without humour quickly becomes abuse, but thankfully most of the time, it makes me laugh, so I take it on the chin.

In return, apart from occasionally pointing out in this colyoom one or two minor Irish idiosyncrasies that upset or amuse me, I’ve enjoyed gentle slagging pleasure by referring to ‘Double Vision’ as ‘this colyoom’.

In October 1992 I was two months off the boat, writing in this noble rag about my efforts to make sense of my new home. Ireland was so incredibly similar to England, yet enigmatically and vitally different.

People were coming up to me in the street saying they had enjoyed my colyoom.

“My what?”

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.