Bray is a seaside town about 12 miles south of Dublin.

We took the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transport) train there on Tuesday evening. It was just after 6pm so the train was pretty pack with commuters going home. Thru prosperous South Dublin City, thru prosperous South County Dublin and into Bray, the most northernly town in County Wicklow.

Dublin is a large city in a surprisingly small county (also called Dublin). Suburban Dublin extends north into County Meath, west into County Kildare and south into County Wicklow.

Essentially this is the Pale…a smaller version of the “English Pale” which dates from the late Middle Ages….that limited part of Ireland, ruled directly from England. “Beyond the Pale”, a phrase now meaning “beyond the accepted bounds of civilisation” was Gaelic-ruled Ireland.

It would be grossly unfair to say that Dublin is an “English” City but it is cosmopolitan. The largest group within the city remains those who are Irish…..not just in terms of nationality but in terms of attitude. There are of course other groups, including migrants from Eastern Europe and West Africa, people we dismiss as West Britons (those who look over-fondly on British influence and rule) and a kind of “Euro-Irish” (a younger professional generation who seem to owe more allegiance to Europe than Ireland).

So the train to Bray was a fairly cross-section of Dubliners…..seemingly from the “professional classes”. Not much different from underground commuter trains heading into Middlesex from London. Or from commuter trains heading into Connecticut from New York.

Certainly I have always been fascinated by commuter behaviour in London. There is an…..isolation……about the commuter. Nobody seems to have struck up friendships. On the Bray train, people were attached to their ipads and their ipods or their iphones. People were texting and posting their latest  “status” to their Facebook friends…..virtual friendship.

Bray has changed. Once a resort for day trippers from Dublin….or people on a week-long trip from Belfast, it is now essentially a dormitory town.

My first visit ever was as a 14 year old on a (too-long) Church trip from Belfast. I bought a headscarf for my mother at a market stall and the trader was talking about a murder in Belfast (of Peter Ward, a sectarian killing pre-dating the actual Troubles by three years).

When the Troubles began, I often retreated to Bray, including the “Jubilee Weekend” of 1977……..which was unbearably hot. And of course after we married and had a young family…it was a good place to go.

 So this week’s trip was nostalgic. Some twenty years ago, we stayed at a small hotel and took our sons to the top of the hill…..Bray Head, where a large cross is on the summit. My mother and Auntie Sheila watched from the hotel garden.

Both my mother and Auntie Sheila are dead some years. Our sons are married. We could never climb the summit now. Essentially Life is about Memory. And a Happy Life is about Happy Memories.

There is a think a dilemna for northern nationalists like myself. We fixate on  a particular image of Ireland, where Bray is still a seaside resort more than a dormitory town for Dublin. And where the people on the train are as Irish as I am. Curiously they seemed LESS Irish.