Water under the bridge

I went to meet my ex for dinner last week, and as I cycled down to the seafront it occurred to me that it must be nearly a whole year now since we'd seen each other. How could I have let that happen? I guess because I spent last summer punishing him for breaking up with me by refusing to see him before I stomped off to the States. Looking back, I'm not sure exactly how 'punished' he'd felt by that, in fairness, considering he had a super-cute new girlfriend to hang out with and I wasn't exactly the best company at the time anyway.

But there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then. And while most of it was laced with piss and vinegar in bars and motels across America, it was water all the same. It was good to see him again; he looked well and happy and I felt instantly fond of him again and was glad we'd finally made time to catch up. He's about to go off travelling himself, with his girlfriend, and as he was telling me about her he stopped and said, wait, is this weird for you? Are you okay with this? And I laughed and reached out and squeezed his arm and said yes, yes I am really okay with this.

And anyway, I said, I have some news of my own. And so I told him about the hot, older film director I'd met in the cafe up the road from work the week before. Really! And he grinned and shook his head and I grinned back and wondered if he was wondering when the hell it is that I'm going to stop making shit up.

The thing about riding a bike

The thing about riding a bike is that nobody can touch you — not the cops, not the kids, not your worst enemies, not anybody. You're too fast. The side-streets are too narrow. Sometimes life is just too easy.

The current world land-speed record stands at 920 miles per hour and is held by a monkey called Eloise, now sadly deceased. They built a machine out of steel and wheels, took it out to the desert in Arizona, put it on the biggest stretch of nothingness you've ever seen, and called for volunteers to ride the thing. Can you believe nobody took them up on it? Not even Crazy Eddie from Las Vegas who once fell off the Empire State Building just for the craic. So they had to put a monkey in it instead; pressed GO out in the Arizona desert and recorded her die at 920mph. Rest in pieces, Eloise.

But like I said, that's just the fastest ever recorded land-speed. They never recorded me flying down Bray hill on my bike; wind at my back, money in my pocket, leaving work on a Friday night.

Three chords and the truth... and a solid mahogany Martin D15

[pic by CH]

I was planning to use my winnings from the poetry prize to pay off half my credit card, because I like the romance in 'rhyming my way out of debt', but then I turned my back on romance and bought half a guitar instead.

"You play guitar like Daddy," said my nephew Otto, rolling his eyes at my C-G-D combinations and trying to teach me bar chords instead.

"That's country music for you though, Otto," I shrugged, secretly pleased that he was comparing me to my brother, the greatest man who ever walked the earth. "All you need is three chords and the truth, right?"

Right. Three chords and the truth and a solid mahogany Martin D15. It cost a thousand euro and it's way, way out of my league but really who cares when it plays like falling in love and it smells like Nowhere, Tennessee.