I have been on holiday – far from broadband, wi-fi or any of the things I take for granted – hence the prolonged silence on the blog. Not dead, just resting.

I went back to Ireland for my cousin’s wedding. And a fine time was had by all.

There are lots of clichés about Ireland – greenness, friendliness, drunken beeriness etc. – and like most clichés there is both crude generalisation and accuracy in all of these.

The latest in that long list of clichés – but, in my opinion, by far the best – is the burbling from ex-pats returning home and marvelling about how much things have changed.

We visited Belturbet – which is the village where my mother grew up. My memory of the town – based on my last visit in the mid-80s – was of a place where the description “sleepy” would have been a serious exaggeration. Comatose might have been closer. There were few jobs and precious little to do anywhere in the town. I remember it being a pretty bleak place.Today things seem far friskier. There’s a good selection of restaurants opening around the town, there are holiday cottages being built all over the place, there’s a new marina and the River Erne has become a big tourist attraction for anglers and the boating crowd. There are big hotels and – perhaps it’s because of the wonderful, wonderful smoking ban – but even the pubs seem happier, lighter places.

And my home town, Dungannon, is almost unrecognisable. Though sadly part of that change has been to drain “The Lines” – the big, muddy field across the road from where I lived where I spent a lot of my boyhood playing, catching frogs, dodging Army patrols and annoying cows. There was a moment when I almost said “I remember when all this was just fields…”

While we were in Ireland I saw Dara O’Briain interviewed on Parkinson. He said that the new Ireland – north and south – was the perfect antidote for nostalgia. Things might be changing fast, but there wasn’t anyone who looked back at the changes and wished things could go back to the way they were.

There was, also, a fantastic science fiction moment during our trip. I was sitting in The Seven Horse Shoes watching the ould fellas at the bar and thinking about my grandfather – who probably stood there many times wearing the same uniform of Irish men of previous generations (a smart jacket and respectable trousers- maybe even a suit - shirt and tie, a pair of shiny black shoes (always well polished) and a tweedy flat cap – and I almost found myself feeling nostalgic. Maybe not that much had changed afterall?…

Then one of those ould fellas pulled out his ultra-thin mobile phone and starts thumbing away a text message.

And welcome back to the twenty-first century, amadán!