Happy St Paddy's!

Sadly, I'm not doing anything for St Patrick's day this year. This is particularly annoying because if I could only muster my friends/bf for an outing to the pub, I'm sure it would be great. There are quite a lot of Irish pubs in Grenoble, and a good slice of the English-speaking population here (which in itself is a good slice of the entire population) is Irish, what with all the foreign exchange students etc. Including me.

I don't sound Irish, apart from the odd "wee" and "sure" and "aye", but everyone says those things nowadays, Irish or not. But when your entire (biological) family is Irish, you've spent the first ten years of your childhood suffering a name like "Mc Anena" (oh how the schoolchildren laughed) and all your family has repeatedly and forcefully told you that you were Irish, there's little choice really. Anyway, who wants to be English? Being Irish is fashionable now, especially in France.

I don't look Irish either. Now you're going to say "how can anyone look Irish?", well there are (according to my experience) two sorts of Irish people: the small (in the women anyway), pale, dark-haired, blue-eyed type, and the tall, pale, red-haired and green-eyed type, which can also be found in abundance in Scotland. I'm tall, pale, blue-eyed and have light brown hair that was blond for ages, in short, I look English.

I could also claim to be French. I am French by adoption, it's just that I haven't gotten round to sorting out my double nationality yet. If my adoptive father was my biological father (which is the case of my sisters), I would actually be half Irish, a quarter Spanish, an eighth French and an eighth Swiss, with an Arabic grandmother thrown in somewhere on the Spanish side. And I thought my nationality was confusing... my sisters have it even worse. One of them therefore considers herself English, and the other, French. In a way, I think the Americans have the right of it - they all call themselves American, before mentioning which state they're from. I don't know what the political, economical and social implications would be if all the countries in Europe decided to join together into one nation, but at least I could just say I was "European" and that'd be the end of it.

Anyway, I'd have loved to go out for St Paddy's tonight because my friends living in Grenoble won't be here next week, they're all off on their yearly internships and after that most of them have finished their studies. But they can't come because they're in the middle of last-minute revision for their mid-terms. Nans can't come with me because he finishes at nine tonight and is more and more tired these days - Mc Donald's are slave drivers whatever town you work in. I can only hope we'll still be here next year, and we'll have made some more local friends by then.

For anyone reading this who happens to be in Grenoble tonight, but doesn't know where to go, I highly recommend the Druid's Pub - only been there once but loved it - they get musicians in on Tuesdays, and tonight's performance will probably be brilliant. Have fun!