ON Friday past I awoke to apparent disaster. The fence between me and my next-door neighbour at the back had been blown down. It’s a wooden affair, which had always seemed upright and immovable. Now it lay flat on the grass.
Then I had a fantasy: What if we left it like that, or even chopped it up and used it for firewood? Yes, my neighbour could now could see into my back garden, take note of all our comings and goings through the back door, and I likewise with his back lawn and his back door.
“Big deal,” my fantasy said. “If there was no fence you’d have a sense of elbow-room, openness." Undeniably true. I wasn’t planning to erect a trampoline for bouncing naked on, and I’m sure he wasn’ t either. With no fence we’d just continue in our everyday, pleasantly dull ways, allowing both sides to gawp at the other, if that was what they wanted to do.
And my fantasy didn’t stop there. My front garden has a small wall over which any burglar could hop if he chose to. All the houses around us are the same: Wooden fencing around the back, protective but useless brick walls at the front. Although we still can't compete with some houses up the road, which have an iron railing (easily surmounted) and a massive big solid gate, which opens only when a code on the gate pillar is activated. And then there are those places they call 'gated communities' – a whole cluster of houses protected at the entrance by a massive, coded gate, the good people safe inside, the bad kept out through vigilance.
Are we mad? We’re determined to put as much obstruction between our place and everyone else, and where we haven’t real barriers, we put up small walls to mark out our territory, like dogs pissing on telephone poles. Even in our cemeteries, we have little mini-walls around each grave, as though to warn the surrounding dead: “This is my territory. Keep out!”
And on TV it continues. When RTÉ on Thursday was warning us about the coming storm, all of Ireland was solid red – apart from the six north-eastern counties, which were orange. Appropriate, yes, Virginia, but again, divisive. The windy weather has no respect for borders, and even less for dividing back fences.
But we’ve a habit of ignoring Nature. The UK found itself in a set of countries which allowed goods and services to travel freely, border-free, between countries. But the UK felt cabin’d, cribb’d, confined – it must assert itself, even if doing so would inflict self-damage.
Most Britons are now sharply aware of the economic pain Brexit has inflicted and will go on inflicting. But admit that setting up borders between itself and the rest of Europe was to engage in self-harm? Not in a hundred years could they admit they got it totally wrong. Everything must change once it enters British territory. Which is why a dwindling but noisy number of unionists hate being allowed access to the EU and keep calling for the borders of yesteryear.
Wake up, guys. We’re told that such giant storms as last week will become a regular feature, so we’d better be ready for them. The obvious thing is to remove pointless fences and barriers, then they won’t be blown violently flat. Opening up to our neighbour may seem radical and risky, but why construct divisions that are pointless? No need to be afraid of each other. Ní neart go cur le chéile – No strength without unity.
