My place or yours?

Getting up early these mornings now that the builders are in. Have to take refuge in TV3's Ireland AM for company. Hangover television and if you haven't one, they make you feel as if you do. On Monday morning they were advertising a holiday competition and the question was: Killarney is based in which Irish county? Don't you just love it? Like Killarney was a movable feast of a multinational and the Kerry people might wake up one morning and it would be gone, lakes, Muckross and all, to Indonesia.

The man in my life (whose waking morning hours are entirely devoted to Radio Four's Today programme) was greatly cheered by a momentary transplanting experience last Saturday morning. Himself and myself were parked on a bench inside the new Dundrum Shopping Centre while the teenager foraged in H&M, Next and Monsoon. I stay with him outside the shops because he tends to use the no-no sentences in shops, the ones that commence with "Is it?" and end with such incendiaries as "practical", "decent", "going to match anything?"

And so he and I sat there pondering the oncoming attack on the credit card, wishing we could be in town in Waterstones instead, and trying to be civil to each other after the blazing row over why the shopping centre looks like a building site from the direction from which we approached it and why the only street signs to give any directions to this threat to the nations spirituality were marked "Red Car Park" and "Green Car Park"? I don't know why it is so. Being Irish, I don't truly expect any different, but being British he does and he can't stop himself.

He endlessly questions. Why is the traffic box rubbed out on the Kilrush Road in Ennis? Because everyone ignores it anyway, they ignore the traffic lights there most of the time so who the hell cares about whether there is a traffic box? Why do we call the parking things "discs" when they are not round? Because they were round once maybe and they'll be round again someday. Why did the headquarters of Chorus TV in Limerick have nobody in who could tell him how to get hooked up? Because no Irish person would ever dream of going to the headquarters to ask such a question and will you stop upsetting people?

But the Dundrum Shopping Centre brought him joy. As we sat there while she finished with Next and planned her attack on the Body Shop and The House of Frazier, didn't the muzak system treat us to 'Land of Hope and Glory'. "We could be in England," says he, delighted with himself, and how could I argue? And so cheered, he dragged us around the food in Marks and Sparks where he bagged a fair amount of crumpets.

I was glad for him really, having his home-from-home moment. He deserves it. When I married him we were in Israel and news of his joining the family did not meet with universal approval. My mother insisted that she would tell my aunt in the States and then refused to tell me what reaction was forthcoming. "Leave it be," she said. "Ah no, go on, tell me what she said," said I, never one for leaving well enough alone. "Well," my mother said, "I'll put it to you this way – the Black and Tans were mentioned."

When we came home to visit the folks in England and Ireland after marrying, he announced "You're in my country now," just as we landed in Heathrow, "and you'd better behave yourself." I remembered and quoted it back to him as we flew into Shannon a week or so later. When we drove up to visit mutual friends in Belfast and came to the checkpoints, I whispered, "Whose country are we in now." It took him a mile or two and a good few minutes to answer. "Yours," he said.

After himself and the young one had gone back to Clare on Sunday, I found that the Sunday Times magazine had a feature on the beauty of the English countryside and called him on the mobile. "Keep it for me," he said. And I will. And keep with it too the memory of those few years we spent in England. The morning mist on the hills between Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. The bluebells in the woods at Wendover.

The place names that became a new litany to me, Steeple Claydon, Upper Winchendon, and the Great and Little versions of Missenden, Kimble and Marlow.

How important the moments are. The memories. How evocative the names. Going around the shops on Saturday, there were girls' names in my head, names that have entered our collective consciousness – Sinead, Lisa, Aimee, Claire and Deirdre. Through the generosity of their friends and families and through tender reporting, we have come to know something of their lives and share, in infinitesimal part, in the grief of their passing. Even those of us who fervently believe in the existence of the place they are now, and which they are surely taking by storm, are unable to comfortably name it. But find it we will.