My wife is smiling. We’re on the final stretch to my dad’s house on our midterm break in Derry and I can’t resist pointing out places of interest. ‘That’s where the Tillie & Henderson factory used to be,’ I say. I’m just about to tell her that it was mentioned in Das Kapital, but she says it first, while rolling her eyes. She’s been coming here with me for 15 years and I have a habit of repeating myself. Worse, since the first 10 years of these visits involved my dad driving us around and telling these exact same things, I am repeating himself.
Becoming your own father is something most men grapple with when they talk to their kids. I’d simply prefer not to do so with my own wife. I purse my lips and resist the urge to indicate where the old checkpoint used to be at Nixon’s Corner.
We are home for four short days but, luckily, we have some slightly more novel sightseeing planned. My wife recently told me she’d never visited the Giant’s Causeway, a geological marvel on the North Antrim coast, comprising 40,000 interlocking, hexagonal basalt columns. She’s adamant that we make the trip and I say this sounds like a great idea – but I wonder if it will live up to her expectations. Will it be, like Wagon Wheels or seaside amusements, one of those things that seemed big when I was small but seem small now I’m big?
My father is less subtle. When she tells him of her intentions, he looks at her as if she’s announced she’s joining a cult. He narrows his eyes and – in that low voice of concern he uses any time he suspects his awful son has led his incorrigible wife astray – tells her it’s an hour away, before adding, ‘You do know it’s just a heap of stones, don’t ye?’
Basically, he’s right, it’s just that it also happens to be a very beautiful heap of scientifically fascinating and culturally important stones, and we arrive full of excitement. I’m impressed with the visitor’s centre, a basalt-grey polyhedron that blends in with the surrounding environment. It’s sleek, futuristic and slightly ominous, like the lair of a tech billionaire hoping to escape the effects of the climate apocalypse.
My daughter enjoys its interior for its large, open-plan layout and exercises her newly walking legs by covering every inch of it. My son – who it turns out knows this world heritage site from its appearance on an episode of Go Jetters – races around inhaling all the facts he can. He plays with a machine that simulates the movement of molten rock and operates a touch screen that takes him back in time 400m years.
And then we make the trip down the coastal route to the causeway itself and my wife is in raptures. Far from being the small strip of my imagination, it is vast and gleams in a shaft of sunlight as if the weather is being directly controlled by the Northern Ireland tourist board. ‘The original Bushmill’s distillery is just up the coast there,’ I start to say, in a voice I realise too late is simply my father’s. ‘Please,’ she says, still smiling, ‘don’t ruin it.’
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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