My favourite Welsh-speaking Texan Chris Cope starts his two-month American road-trip this week, which has me both eaten up with jealousy and hanging on to his every word — if I don't get a postcard from every State there's gonna be trubb.
I took this shot heading towards Dallas last year. Yes, I should be taking new pics, but unless you want a photo of my desk I got nothing.
When I was twelve I came home from school one day to find my mother painting my bedroom black.
'What's going on?' I asked.
'I'm painting your bedroom black,' she said, with that edge in her voice that told me she and my father had had a row.
I went back downstairs to see what had happened. Yes, they had had a row. The air in the house was thicker and my father moved things around differently. On an ordinary day this would drive me to the top of the stairs with the dog, the two of us clinging on to each other, not wanting to hear what was going on but keeping our ears pricked up anyway in case we missed something. But this was no ordinary day — I was getting a black bedroom, something I'd always wanted. The dog slunk off to sit by himself behind the sofa.
By day my mother was a cleaner at a local school but by night she was a great artist. She had a studio — an old shed — at the back of the garden, full of paint and oil and chicken-wire and clay. If you went anywhere near that shed you'd get paint on you. (Sometimes if you even just thought hard enough about that shed you'd get paint on you, so watch out). She drew portraits of people from the village and landscapes of the mountains and the sheep and sometimes she sculpted clay heads of the men she'd met along the way. And then, when we needed the money, she'd just forge a Renoir or a Degas or a fake Van Gogh.
One day my father said Mary, wouldn't it be nice if every time we looked up from the sofa in the living room we could see the sky sitting right up there above our heads? Nobody could think of anything nicer than that, so my mother got up a ladder and painted a cloudscape right up there on the living room ceiling. And now, to this day, every time you look up from the sofa it's like the sky is sitting right up there above your head.
When she was done painting my bedroom black we stood in it, the four of us — me, my mother, my father, the dog — and looked around. Black walls, black doors, black ceiling, black desk, black window frames, black chest of drawers.
'It's very dark, isn't it?' said my mother, dubiously.
'It might brighten up a bit once you put your posters back up,' said my father, who had stopped moving things around differently by now.
'But this is how I like it,' I said, even though it was darker than I had ever really expected an entirely black bedroom to be.
The dog went back behind the sofa.
My brother Fergy in Galway. Born with the look of the fox about him, but only in his beard.
Bono was sitting outside the office when I cycled into work this morning, which threw me into a state of turmoil. On the one hand, I enjoy the inflated sense of self-importance that comes from getting to say hello to a famous person — Hello Bono, beautiful day isn't it? — but, on the other hand, the last thing I wanted was for Bono to see me wearing my cycling helmet.
I don't want anybody to see me wearing my cycling helmet — not Bono, not anybody. One of life's greatest formulas states that motorbike helmets and sunglasses are always cool, but cycling helmets and spectacles are never cool; not ever. I once crashed my bike into an oncoming car on a busy high street, flew through the air, and landed on my chest cracking three ribs. And yet all I could think was: "Great. Here I am with a small crowd gathering around me, lying broken and bleeding on Reykjavik's main shopping street, and now everybody who's anybody is going to see that I wear a cycle helmet." Ever since then I've been careful to remove it and hide it in my backpack before entering an area where I might have to encounter cool people. But this morning I was in a rush to get to work on time, and there I was all of a sudden, sweating, glasses steamed up, wearing a cycle helmet in front of Bono.
All was okay later, however, when I saw The Edge in the canteen. Hello The Edge, beautiful day isn't it? Well, I didn't say that. I also managed to resist the temptation to quiz him about his name. How does that work, anyway? Having a name that begins with the definitive article? Does everybody call him The Edge? Surely his wife doesn't call him The Edge? Or does she? Either way, I've decided I'm now only answering to the name of 'The Annie'.
The only people who are allowed to use the word 'ginger' are ginger people. If you're not ginger yourself then please stick to one of only two acceptable alternatives: the first being 'redheads'; the second being a term coined by my brother Fergus: 'those who have the look of the fox about them'.
Lots of people with the look of the fox about them spend their adolescence wishing they'd been born blond or brunette or Japanese instead. It's not until we reach adulthood that we get over it and let the foxy love flow. And then bang, look, all of a sudden everyone else is wishing that they were ginger, too.
Sorry, but it is not possible to 'dye your hair ginger' because ginger is not a colour. You can dye your hair a nice copper tone or some kind of auburn hue, but you'll never have the hot coals burning at the pit of your stomach from being born with the look of the fox about you.
This is Hvítserkur in northern Iceland, taken way back in the day when dinosaurs walked the earth and I spent four painful hours a month letting Toni & Guy bleach every last trace of ginger out of my poor hair.
A poem I wrote has won first prize in the 2009 Fish Publishing writing contest!
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, what, you write poetry? Because that's what everyone says. And then they take a step backwards in case I bust a rhyme in their face and laden them with the weight of my childhood.
Well, I don't usually write poetry — at least I hadn't done since my (largely uneventful) childhood — but I did this year when I moved back home after my trip to America. Yes, it must have been living with my parents again that drove me to verse. That, and my short-lived busking career in Belgium, when I got fed up of waiting for someone to throw a euro at my head and I entered a writing contest in an attempt to do something constructive with my unemployment. And now I've won! First prize for my poem and runner-up for a one-page story — I am simultaneously honoured and flabbergasted.
The second thing people say when I tell them is, well, what's this poem about? And that's when I take a moment to think of my friend, an actual poet, who once said to me that there are really only two preoccupations in life; one is love, of course, and the other is death. And I thought long and hard for a while — love or death, love or death, biscuits or cake, love or death? — until I finally concluded that this poem must be about both, seems it's about thinking I was in love, and then thinking maybe I wasn't.
