On Monday we were invited to a Provocation talk by the students of Module 1.3. We were asked at the beginning to describe ourselves with a few labelling words. Mine are in the title. We had only a few seconds to come up with our labels, and I’m glad I chose these ones. The latter pair are quite unspecific, and the first two are defined, but would be considered as adequate and non-threatening.
Veronica gave a very interesting talk, but I was struck by something Steve said. He spoke of an artist, described him and the different characteristics of his two close friends. Then he said that all three people were different personas of the same person. It definitely rang a bell.
When I lived in Berlin I was a physicist at the Max Planck Gesellschaft, one of the top research institutes in the world, for 3 years. One of the group leaders was an Englishman who loved rugby and introduced me to his German club. Consequently I mixed with physicists, academics, chemists, environmentalists and rugby players mainly there and my labels would have been academic, physicist, German speaker, rugby lad. I would fly back to Northern Ireland every year to see my family., and on the way I would stop over in Holland and in southern England. Near Amsterdam I would visit friends from home who worked as printers for Elsevier, after the University Press in Belfast had closed. For them I was a lifelong friend, a marathon runner (they were runners too) and from the same area of Belfast, same roots, someone they could feel safe with in their company.. Labels: friend, confidant, marathon runner, mad scientist. After a few days I would fly to Gatwick and see my sister who lived near Chichester and my cousin who lived near Aldershot. There I was a family member and a sort of patriarch, as the oldest member of our generation in the family, but a bit of a weirdo, being a scientist and bookworm. I sometimes would meet up with a friend from Wembley whom I had worked with in the GEC research centre on early LCD, LED displays and Integrated Circuits. With him I was friend, physicist and Rory Gallagher fan. Then, finally, back to Northern Ireland where I would be a son. So, inside a week I was switching personas 4 or 5 times to fit with the company I was keeping and the expectations of others; wearing the perceived labels. Do we all do that?
National and Religious Identity
In Northern Ireland the first thing you want to know about a person are these. You might not be asked straight out, It might be phrased as, “what school did you go to?”, or “where do you live? Both simple questions, but often indicative of ‘what foot you kick with’ and ‘where you say your prayers’. I can still silence a pub in Coleraine just by going through the door, and I’ve lived there for more than 30 years. such labels are of only passing interest away from our parochial homeland,
