The Kissing Gate

There used to be a wrought iron Kissing Gate along the pond path in the village. It was a dirt path around a man-made pond, and as I recall you could bypass it rather than use it. We used it. It was removed at some point in the early 1980s when the path was paved over as part of a Local Regeneration Scheme but our compliance was already established.
I walked through that gate many times as a child, making an unknown number of passages through its threshold. It was foreboding and prescient, requiring negotiation. A harbinger of an impending future when British army checkpoints were to guard every entry route to the village in the years to follow: the negotiation of pedestrian and
vehicular passage occurring on every journey, in any direction. A non-negotiable reality.

This infrastructural revenant has brought with it the potential for reconciling the past, and the recognition that the past is, in fact, the present. The option to comply or ignore its gesture lingers on.

Extract from Disorientation and Dissimulation: Stories of Dissent and Discovery from a Post-Utopian Village.

Roisín McGuigan, 2022