My grandmother lives in sheltered accommodation in the London borough of Lambeth. In the late 1940s she and my grandfather, newly wed, migrated to London from Sligo, a small county town on Ireland's Atlantic seaboard. On her last visit to Sligo in 1995, as the Celtic Tiger was beginning to stir, she was depressed by what she saw. The new realities didn't fit her sense of the town, an amalgam of memories, some from her childhood, others from the late 1960s, when she would holiday there with my grandfather and their three children. It was only on her final visit that she registered the cumulative effect of the steady drip drip drip of deaths she had followed in the back pages of the Sligo Champion. Now she no longer recognises the names recorded there and disapproves of the 'vagary' that otherwise fills the Champion's pages. When, a few years ago, she read that Sligo was bidding for city status, she wrote to the Irish prime minister demanding that a stop be put to this nonsense. Those blackguards were getting too big for their boots.

LRB 9 October 2008 | PDF Download