My family is Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh – with some Russian, German and Jewish thrown in generations back. I was born in London, raised in Northern Ireland and live in Scotland. My parents’ marriage was "mixed" – a phrase which itself explains the profound dysfunction of identity in Northern Ireland: one Catholic and one Protestant. Little wonder, then, that the punk song Identity – "Identity is the crisis can’t you see" – by X-Ray Spex seemed to speak directly to me as a kid. But eventually even my working class sense of self got jumbled.

Source: The Herald October 04, 2022 07:23 UTC