Now that’s irony for you: the English are leaving the EU just as people here had started to like them!

WHEN I was a boy, there were fixed points on the calendar that dictated the street games we played. For the autumn and winter, that meant soccer, when everyone would be lined up against a wall for teams to be picked by the captains, a process I exited when, on one occasion, my younger sister was selected ahead of me, and I overheard one of the captains say to the other: ‘I’ll give you my best player if you take Philip.’

When the Horse Show was on in the RDS, we made rudimentary jumps from breeze blocks, logs, cardboard boxes and, when we wanted to be fancy, a paddling pool to simulate the water jump, and we trotted and leapt around the course, only without an actual horse.

From late spring through summer, the hurls came out and, every July, fresh from long afternoons watching Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, we played tennis.

It was particularly easy to do so in Oakton Park in Ballybrack, where I grew up. The roads were poured in rectangular sections of concrete, rather than Tarmacadam, and four of these rectangles, between our house and the Smiths’ house across the street, perfectly matched the quadrants of a tennis court.

Sword

With twine for a net, we were good to go. As it happened, I proved better at this solo sport than I ever was on a team, so I longed for the one chance a year to shine.

And I always wanted to go to Wimbledon to see it for myself.

That dream finally was realised last Friday. My elder sister lives in England and applied to the lottery for tickets and, successful for the first time in three decades, got two of them. By a cruel twist of fate, she already had a holiday booked, and so she very generously gave them to me and the same younger sister who used to wave as she dribbled past me with a football before burying it between two jumpers on the school car park.

Fate is a two-edged sword, and on this occasion, it worked in my favour. Last Friday also was my 55th birthday, and it proved to be the best yet. When the shuttle bus from the train station crested the hill just after Wimbledon Village and started its descent to the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, I caught sight of the courts for the first time, and I genuinely got teary. It’s a long time since I’ve been so excited, and it was a day I’ll never forget. We had an outdoor lobster lunch in blazing sunshine, drank maybe a little more Pimm’s than was advisable, and had seats on Centre Court to watch Serena Williams and Roger Federer both win in straight sets.

Everything about the day was impeccable, and for me, the apotheosis of peak England, in microcosm everything they do best – organisation, tradition, propriety and manners.

Then, on Saturday, my sister and my niece came with me to the Venture Inn in Reigate in Surrey, where we bumped into my nephew’s old school friends, FaceTimed him as he’s on his gap year in Sydney, and watched England beat Sweden in the World Cup quarter-final.

Now, I’ve never subscribed to the Anyone But England mentality of many of my countrymen (well, maybe in rugby, but that’s almost exclusively down to Martin Johnson and Eddie Jones), but I genuinely was surprised this time, because I didn’t have to force myself to cheer England, as I sometimes have done in the past. Instead, it was instinctive, and when the first goal went in, I was just as excited as I would have been if the shirts were green.

Holdouts

I liked it. I liked the ease with which I could support a team in a way that, even 20 years ago, would have been frowned upon here, and I was gutted to see them lose in Wednesday’s semi against Croatia. Nor was I the only one. Despite the usual holdouts, clinging desperately to the past, a significant number of my friends, in real life and on social media, were professing their support for England too. Many of us lived there in the past, and have English friends as well as relations, and we wanted them to have the sort of moment we enjoyed during Italia ’90, and against Italy in New Jersey in 1994. But it also comes, I reckon, from the new esteem in which Ireland and England (and I say that specifically, because we always had common cause with the Welsh and Scots) hold each other.

It didn’t start with the 2011 visit here of Queen Elizabeth, though her respectful acknowledgment during that trip of a difficult but nonetheless unalterable shared history added a few gilded paving stones on the road to reconciliation.

For me, standing in the quadrangle of Windsor Castle three years later to see the band of the Irish Guards play Amhrán na bhFiann as she in turn greeted Michael D Higgins on the first State visit to Britain by an Irish president, presented a moment I hardly had dreamed possible in my lifetime, and one that always will be a highlight of my professional career.

I probably have been to England at least 300 times, to see family both as a child and as an adult, to go to sporting events or to the theatre, for work, and on many occasions just on day trips in a van to Ikea in Warrington, long before the Belfast or Dublin shops opened.

Cheering

In May, I was there to cover the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, so it was nice also to see them here this week, looking so relaxed on walkabout in Trinity College.

That so many turned out to greet them surely is down to the fact that, as an actress and a prince (and not just any prince, but the son of Diana), they are seen as much as celebrities as they are as royals, but it still showed a new maturity in our relationship with the neighbours, just as cheering on the football team did.

In fact, fractious as life occasionally has been, the English have given us much in the way of cultural wealth, from music to television to sport, without us ever having to dilute our own identity in any way.

This new familiarity is a good thing, though also perhaps a millisecond late. Some years ago, a new family rented the house next door and I promised myself I would knock and say hello.

A mere six months later, a catalyst came in the form of a radio ad for Get To Know Your Neighbour Day, sponsored by the ESB, and I decided to act. That morning, I got up, picked out a bottle of wine, and went to drop it in – only to see, when I opened the blinds, that they were filling a removal van.

In the week that Brexit became even more contentious across the water, I was reminded of that incident, and it saddened me – because just as we all were getting to know the English, and like them, we’ve come up a day late and a dollar short, because they’re moving out too.