Gallowglass

The pleasures of exile

I’m spending the weekend in Washington DC (will be here again soon for the whole summer - my wife still lives here) and was delighted to discover that Marvellous Market, just off Dupont Circle, now stocks Kerrygold butter. This is probably something that can’t be explained very well to a non-Irish person; basically, North American butter sucks (tho’ y’all have the ice cream thing figured out out waaaay better than we do). When I first visited the US, during the summer of 1990, I literally used to dream about Irish butter, now I can spread it to my heart’s content. All I need for my happiness to be complete is to find a shop that sells Tayto salt and vinegar crisps and Barry’s Tea at reasonable prices. These are of course silly things to get worked up about; but it’s a universal experience for expatriates to miss the little things as much (if not more than) the greater ones. Dante, who was exiled from Florence, speaks of how

You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste
of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
descending and ascending others’ stairs.

He’s talking about two things here. First, as an exiled Florentine, he doesn’t like salty bread. Florentines don’t use salt when baking (the result, as far as I remember, of an extended period when the Pisans cut off their salt supplies), so that their bread tastes like blotting paper to non-natives (I lived in Florence three years: my advice to outsiders is to order “pane Pugliese” in the local bake shops when possible). Second, spiral staircases in Florence tend to curve around the opposite way from staircases elsewhere. Dante’s main point is unassailable; as an exile, you feel longing for the small and unexceptional parts of daily life in your home country, and a quite extraordinary degree of comfort whenever you find them again. Which is why my fridge is now stocked up with Kerrygold.