If I travel anywhere, and if circumstances and family members allow me, I’ll visit some of the local record shops. When I was in London I did get the chance, so I trekked out to this place in east Putney that I had been to before. It’s pretty small, with the records and CDs arranged shambolically. Everything is ostensibly filed alphabetically, but you’ll find bands starting with “B” in the “M” section. You’ll find jazz in the punk section. The shop has a website, but it doesn’t work very well. And if there are even two other customers, it feels crowded. Everyone has to squeeze past each other and wait their turn to flick through the bins.It was a bit of a mess. Just my kind of place.I arrived early to avoid any other browsers and spent over an hour combing through every part of the shop: just me and the man behind the small counter who (I assume) was the owner; who said if I needed help with anything, to ask. But I wasn’t searching for anything specific. The joy is the search, and the serendipity of what I might find.Like all the best record shop proprietors, he made no comment on what I chose to buy. You don’t want to be selling people records and then appear to be judging their taste, particularly as one of the records featured a photograph of a man dressed in a kilt and helmet and carrying a massive sword. It looked like a naff collection of Highland folk songs, though it was actually a funk album.Instead, as a conversation opener, he asked: are you local?Presumably he’d already registered my accent, so it was the way he phrased it that was interesting. Because this was London, a city that is home to pretty much every ethnicity on Earth, he didn’t say: where are you from? That question can be freighted with judgment and not very thinly veiled racism, especially when directed towards brown and black-skinned people. Presumably, many of his customers had come to live in London from other countries. Some were the children or grandchildren of immigrants. Some came from other parts of the UK. But all of them could be local.I told him that I was visiting from Dublin, that I had been to his shop once before, and had promised myself to come again and give myself more time to explore. He was rather delighted with the answer. (I didn’t mention the mess.)But after I left and was back on the tube, it struck me that I could have answered his question in a completely different way. I could have said that I was local.I was born in London, and lived there until I was nine. I was 12 when my family – an Irish mother and a Scottish father – moved to Ireland. For me, the answer to the question where are you from? has always been slightly complicated. I am unequivocally Irish. Because I’ve lived most of my life here, you could say I’m a Dubliner. I just originate from more than one place. [ Seán Moncrieff: I kept my late father’s watch on a bookshelf for 16 years. Then I decided to wear itOpens in new window ]I’m far from unique in this. There are now few parts of Ireland that do not contain first- or second-generation migrants, for whom the question where are you really from? is not just offensive, but patently stupid, even if it is not intended that way. In fact, the answer is complicated for nearly everyone. How often have you met people who declare themselves to be from Louth, but they’ve lived in Cork City for the past 40 years? Where are they really from? Drill into the ancestry of the most ardent white Hiberno-nationalist and invariably you’ll find that their ancestors came from Spain or Denmark or England. Ethnicity is not one, clearly defined thing. It is more like a series of intersecting circles. What is more important is what is immediate: that we are here, together, now. We’re all local.