Last Monday, we took our son home to Ireland, partly to imbue him forever in the sacred glow of the ancient Celts and partly to get his passport forms. Since the Brexit referendum, the number of UK-born folk applying for Irish passports has risen by 95% – almost as if being part of the EU carries tangible benefits – so a trip back can often vastly speed up the process of procuring one. On Tuesday, however, we left the admin behind, escaped the suburbs of Dublin and toured due south toward the rolling, boggy hills of the Wicklow mountains, where we decided our son would place his foot on soil for the first time.

It’s a part of the world I truly love, although I have exacting standards for what I want when I go there. I want thick smells of damp earth and mist curling round the bog like vapour from a horse’s mouth. Everywhere a dense gauze of drizzle, and sad gangs of wiry, dejected ravens; the kind that look like they’re serving penance for their past lives as Elizabethan hangmen. There’s a comforting dread to the slate-grey skies and wet air, and having no one else to pass you save a few bedraggled cyclists. These, with stern red faces topped with small, floppy caps, could be training for a triathlon, or giving themselves enough mental space to plot the murder of their uncle.

On this day, unfortunately, we got none of this – save the floppy-capped cyclists, who are a fairly safe bet – and instead ascended the hills to find clear skies and a warm breeze. We sunned ourselves during pit stops. We chatted to passers-by. We stopped for ice cream. It was all so hideously disappointing.

On a trip already freighted with notions of nationhood and identity, I realised that even my short time away had given me unrealistic and darkly romantic expectations. As someone anaemic to the effects of patriotism, I was struck with the horrible thought that I’d become that guy: the father of an English son, not just hellbent on rendering him Irish in legal parchment, but marching him up a hill for some imagined, barefoot communion with his mother earth.

I couldn’t escape the possibility I had become that sentimental eejit I used to so despise

I contented myself that the passport was fairly essential if he ever wanted to live and work in the European Union, and that my interest in placing his feet on Irish soil was near-solely out of my desire to get a maddeningly cute shot of his tiny little feet touching grass for the first time. But I couldn’t escape the possibility I had also become that sentimental eejit I used to so despise.

An excitable, sometimes maudlin, sentimentality for Ireland is something that develops, like skin on porridge, any time Irish people are left away from their homeplace for too long. I’ve never worked out an exact metric, but I reckon every year you spend away from Ireland, you become roughly 10% more tolerant of chain pubs, even the ones in airports that would have you believe Irish people can only truly relax once they’ve collected 40 aluminium street signs, displayed their collection of vintage typewriters and plastered battered bicycles to every wall.

Growing up on the literal border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic had, I thought, rinsed me of the patriotism which appears to brew naturally within the breasts of other men. Taking pride in whether you live on one side of a line-in-the-dirt or the other becomes a lot more difficult when you can spit on said line from your bedroom window. And yet here I was, lamenting the sun and the breeze and the friendly passers-by, because they refused to tally with the image of Ireland I had in my head.

None of this is unique to Ireland or Irishness. At some point, nostalgia returns us all, saucer-eyed, to the same hills and roads we used to know, rendering us fascinated by their alien familiarity. Whether you moved to a new country, continent, or two towns down the road, it can happen with the knots of a much-loved tree, or the railings of your nana’s house. Everyone knows the bittersweet pain of returning to your old school, amazed by the nooks and crannies it’s retained, now so small in scale, but horrified at the new, modern entrance with its blue pillars and swooping roof.

It’s left to others to step in and stop you making a fool of yourself, like that friend on a night out who grabs your elbow and wheels you to the kebab shop, as soon as you state your intention to make friends with a police horse.

This week, that role fell to my son, who upon being marched to a turf-strewn incline, looked impassively at the small, soggy footprint he had made, paused for a moment, and continued mashing a small wet fist into his mouth. He’s not, it would seem, one for public displays of easy sentiment. Perhaps he really is English after all.

One more thing…

In preparing my son’s first grassy walks, I was made aware that many babies are preternaturally terrified of grass. Search YouTube for ‘babies scared of grass’ and witness first-hand the gymnastic contortions to which they’ll resort to avoid the stuff.

If that all sounds too sickeningly wholesome for your video diet, might I suggest something merely sickening instead, namely the relatively new phenomenon of Wet Unboxing videos, in which British supermarket fare – sandwiches, pasties, etc – are submerged in water and then opened? The results are surreal and oddly sinister.

For a more modern take on Ireland, Sally Rooney’s exquisite novel, Normal People, was recently long- listed for the Booker Prize. If you can’t tear yourself away from a screen long enough to read it, the BBC adaptation has just been announced under the direction of Room director Lenny Abrahamson.

Follow Seamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats