Now that I'm sort of half-heartedly thinking about leaving Dublin, I like to run little scenarios of what my post-Ireland life will be like. "Oh!" people will exclaim, "You lived in Ireland for two years? (Or eighteen months or however long I end up lasting.) What was that like?"

Then, during this daydream, I try and sum up Dublin in a single, crisp anecdote. It's a game I like to play when I'm walking to work. I love to sum things up. I'm the sort of person who, when ending a relationship, replies to some moronic thing he's just said by saying "Well that just sums it all up, doesn't it?" and then slams out of the room.

If someone put a gun to my head and told me to sum up Dublin at this very moment, I'd go with this:

Imagine that an Irish person was telling you this. Insert brogue. "So I was on the bus, like, going past Grafton Street. Absolutely gorgeous day, but the sun was just after going behind a cloud, and it was starting to get grey. There was this group of knackers on the bus, probably just past their Junior Certs, absolute jonners. They start commenting on the sun going down and then one of then raises her fat little fist in the air, extends her middle finger, and to the sun says in her little skanger voice 'faggot.' Like, she called the sun a faggot for going behind a cloud. It's the sun! It's what the sun does! Ah, jonners."

So if someone asks me to sum up Dublin, it will be the time that a teenage girl wearing a tracksuit with overly straight hair and too much eyeliner raises her middle finger to the sky and calls the sun a faggot.