Back to Normal

I’ve been back for over a month now and the amazing thing is how quickly everything in life goes back to normal. As expected I returned to the question ‘well how was Washington?’ I keep thinking about this and even now, over a month after returning home, I still have no answer. Thinking about Washington now it seems like a distant mirage, a world away from life at home but for two months it was a distinct reality.

I think the last day of work as an intern was when it really hit me just how extraordinary the experience of being an intern on the Hill had been. Me and Neil spent the afternoon walking the Brumidi- painted corridors recounting the stories we had passed on to tour groups during our internship (if you’re ever there look out for the impressive Hawaiian statues and the painting of John Adams standing on Jefferson’s toes) . Most of these stories are doubtless true but some are likely the result of an inadvertent game of Chinese whispers played out by generations of interns creating an apocryphal history of the buildings (can you really fit the statue of liberty inside the Rotunda?).

Looking around the neo classical grandeur that had been our workplace for the last 6 weeks it suddenly dawned on me just how exceptional, in every sense of the word, working here had been. But, equally I was aware and surprised that this feeling of awe had not been with me for the whole of my 6 weeks there. In fact it was amazing how quickly working on the other side of the Atlantic in such auspicious surroundings became part of the everyday, it took the realisation of departure for it to sink in.
Normality can become whatever situation a person finds themselves in. In Northern Ireland the situation of growing up without an understanding or even with a hatred of your neighbour became normal. The challenge now is to establish a new day to day normality in Northern Ireland without a hatred and mistrust of each other.