Around now, 13 years ago, I got on a plane in Brussels with about 5% of my belongings – the rest had been collected and were in transit somewhere between Brussels and Dublin, and moved back to Ireland. I’m not sure what I expected. I do know I had plans to stay in Dublin for 2 or 3 years and then move back down to Cork. It never quite worked out that way. I didn’t buy the house I was planning to buy and I haven’t yet met someone to spend the rest of my life with.

There have been lots of unexpected good things. There has been the kitesurfing, and the photography, and the being profiled by the Irish Independent as a blogger, and by RTE as a photographer. I got stuck into the boards.ie community in a big way, and twitter also. And via those two tools have made a lot of friends around the place. I’ve been very lucky in many respects.

At some point, I did point out that moving house, and starting off from scratch, building a social circle and all that got harder as you got older. This was why, at certain points, I did not move back to France, to Bordeaux, as I thought about for a while, just because at that stage of my life, it would be too lonely. But I don’t think it works like that any more. I could move anywhere in the world it seems, at this stage, and somehow, the global community that is Ravelry, would open doors for me as, it did, here in Dublin. I’m not so worried about moving from that point of view; I just own lots of stuff.

But Ireland has been a rough place to live as well. Not purely because it’s doing poorly economically, but because that doing poorly could have so easily been avoided. I think this happened because of a lack of confidence. Confidence to say that debt driven growth was not good enough, would lead to tears. If you said this in Ireland in the early 2000s, you were a pariah. I got told where the Ryanair site was often enough if I wasn’t happy with how well the country was doing.

Most years, at this time of year, I remember being an emigrant. There wasn’t really a lot wrong with it then; and even less now with much better/less expensive communications and the like. It is not something that would bother me so much, apart from the packing.

Dublin has changed a lot. Some things are better. It seems to me that it’s less alcoholic in the past couple of years, or maybe I’m just out with a different bunch of people now. Property is no longer insanely expensive, although I’d argue it’s still over priced for the economic situation of the city. Some of the infrastructure is better. For all that Dublin Bus has cut back on services, they are still streets better than they were in 1999. Irish Rail has improved beyond recognition and we have things like the Luas and Dublin Bikes. These are all good things.

I still don’t own a house here. There are a couple of different reasons for this but the key one at the moment is for all the houses we have on sale, I just don’t like anyway. And deep down in my heart, I’d prefer to be buying a house near the coast in Cork, with greater access to the Atlantic. Possibly, the five years of eurohopping still have tainted my soul in some respect and I may never fully settle.