KELLS — A twinning proposal has reached Kells. The town is invited to become the twin of a display case in Dublin.
The proposal is warmly written and generous in every respect but the one that matters. It offers exchange visits, shared events, a ceremony with speeches and a plaque for each partner. It describes Kells and the case as "partners in heritage." It does not offer the Book, which is the only reason the case is interesting.
Twinning, as every town in Ireland knows, is a fine old custom. Places with something in common agree to be friends. They swap brass bands and football teams, they host each other's councillors and they put up a sign at the edge of town. The partners are separate and equal. Each has its own life and its own people. That is the whole idea.
A fictional composite of Kells people who have sat through twinning dinners with the town’s Italian twin, Torre San Patrizio, said: "Twinning is lovely. You meet a town you'd never have met otherwise. But you don't twin with your own family. If my brother was being kept in somebody else's house, I wouldn't want a plaque saying we were partners. I'd want him home."
The proposal sets out the exchange programme in detail. A delegation from Kells will travel 69 km to visit its twin. The delegation will be shown the case, the lighting and the view through the glass. There will be tea afterwards. In return, the case will receive a framed photograph of Kells, to be hung in a corridor nearby.
The return visit is where the arrangement runs into trouble. Twinning works both ways. When a band from Kells goes abroad, a band from the twin town comes back the following year. The case, however, does not travel. Nor does what is inside it. Kells has invited it before. Trinity refused loans of the Book in 2000 and again in 2011, so the twin has already turned down every invitation, and the arrangement has not formally begun.
A fictional composite of people who have organised twinning exchanges, and know how lopsided ones end, said: "If one side always does the travelling, it's not twinning. It's visiting hours."
There is also the question of what the partners have in common. Twin towns share a river, an industry, a saint or a history. Kells and the case share a single thing. It was made in one of them, carried out of it in 1653, and has been kept in the other since the 1660s. That is not a shared history. It is the same history, seen from opposite ends of the road.
The proposal suggests a twinning sign for the approach roads into Kells. The town has thought about the wording and could not find any that was both polite and true. A fictional composite of the council's sign committee, standing in for everyone who has ever argued over a road sign, said: "We tried 'Twinned with a case in Dublin.' It looked like a confession."
Kells has written back. The reply thanks the Dublin side for the offer and declines it. The town already has a partner in heritage. It is the Book, and they are not twins. The town made the Book. Kells is not looking for a friendship arrangement with a cabinet. It is looking for the return of something that was taken out of its keeping and never sent back.
In place of a twinning ceremony, Kells has proposed a simpler event. There will be no plaques and no exchange of gifts. The Book will come home to Kells, and the town will be there to meet it. Not as a partner. Not on loan. Home.