The Gift

"These things, these things were here and but the beholder
  Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
  And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet."  

              - Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Hurrahing in Harvest" 

A chill that speaks of autumn gives way to the strengthening sun. From mid morning, as I walk, migrant workers move through roadside vineyards, hefting heavy, laden baskets shoulder high. Ahead, the approach to the village is splashed with crimson where fruit has fallen and been crushed by turning wheels. The air is suffused with the aroma of fermentation, the smell of La Rioja in harvest.

Beneath my feet the track puts on a mantle of asphalt to become the Calle de Esperanza. I pass through shaded streets, by stone houses bearing the coats of arms of long-dead inhabitants, to a white-walled cemetery where the asphalt gives way again to dust. Ahead the Way stretches westward to the horizon, through a patchwork quilt of red and brown where vines are arranged like neat, green braids, flecked with autumn red above soil of ochre and ash.

     “Peregrino”.

From behind the wall a sun-hardened man appears. Pilgrim, he calls me, recognising me as one of the fraying transients that for centuries have passed along this road.

He’s in his, eighties, I’m sure.  He wears an old suit jacket over his bare chest and his face is like dusty, figured mahogany, so perfect an echo of the landscape surrounding him that he seems other-worldly. He moves towards me, rocking from side to side on worn out hips, gesturing at me with an outstretched arm.

     Wait.

I’m surprised at the strength of his grip as he grabs my shoulder. Even as I tower over this man, I feel a wave of fright at this unbidden contact. His hand finds my own and I feel him press something into my palm as he closes my fingers into a fist and holds it in a rough grasp.

     “Un bolso”,  he says, nodding along the path. “Por el Camino”.

     A gift. For the Way.

He turns away and moves towards the village; a tarnished smile, then his arm raised in a rearward salute. I open my hand: three walnuts, hard and gnarled. Beneath the shell, sustenance. For the way.

I gaze for a while at the old man’s gift: the recognition and kindness of one who had nothing else to give.

Turning towards the afternoon sun, my vision blurs to a corona of gold.

Sub Rosa

The broom handle’s a bit short, so I bend over as I sweep the pigeon shit off my balcony. I’m surprised to find myself here; the distraction reflex is immediate. It tends to happen as soon as I realise I’m going to have to do some proper, work-related thinking. There’s a brief, barely perceptible instant of discontinuity, like a reel change during a movie, then I’m washing the dishes or pairing off some of the pile of odd socks that have accumulated since I moved in to the Thinking Flat.

I pause for a moment, then go back inside. In front of me a familiar ghost, kneeling on my counter top, cleaning out my cupboards with soapy water on the day I moved in. I turn away and everything shuffles back to its rightful place. It’s my home now, or as close to a home as I have.

Perched on the top of a ladder, I painted the ceiling rose, dabbing white paint into its Victorian intricacies. I could see patches of bright purple paint sill held in cracks and crevices. A bright purple ceiling rose in my little flat.

The white version looked down when I began to fill my space with the stuff I needed, and when that space began to fill itself with the ephemera that I can’t seem to throw out. An empty champagne snipe, a bottle of moisturiser that I know is in behind those books somewhere. A greeting card with a message so heart-felt that I don’t want to touch it. Space was at a premium, though, with all that stuff, so only one bedside locker. Only one dinner tray to put on my lap so I can eat while watching television from the couch.

There’s a mirror on my chimney breast that reflected us all; me, my visitors, the ones whom I invited in. If I’d looked in the right direction at the right time I could have had an outsider’s view, though reversed, of careful, fearful beginnings and a tearful denouement that seems to stand like a cold bookend on a shelf full of crumbling volumes.

I left for a while. The rooms warmed and cooled with the outside air. I came back and shaved off my beard of eight years in a tiny mirror balanced on two screws in the bathroom wall. A fatter face than I had remembered. Older, certainly. It felt like looking at an estranged brother; curiosity, then indifference and the recollection of the reasons why we hadn't spoken in years.

I had defended this place, this property with my foreign name on the freehold, as maybe the others had, those who had lived in these rooms over the last century and a half. I had defended the implied independence. I had defended my right to drill holes in the wall and to fill my drawers and cupboards with detritus that one day I’d be too sentimental to throw out.

Under the elderly ceiling rose, the intricacies and frustrations and confusion and tenderness of a suburban life.

The Dead Man's Penny

Memorial Tablet - November 1918

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,
(Under Lord Derby's scheme). I died in hell -
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duck-boards; so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.

At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,
He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;
For, though low down upon the list, I'm there;
"In proud and glorious memory" ... that's my due.
Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:
I suffered anguish that he's never guessed.
Once I came home on leave: and then went west ...
What greater glory could a man desire?
 

              - Siegfried Sassoon 

When I was a child, visits to my grandmother’s house were punctuated by a small ritual. I would detach myself from my family and make my way to the living room at the front of the house. The room was seldom used and it had had a stillness about it. In the corner, near the window, stood an octagonal table topped with white lace, and at its centre a potted African violet with its strange, fuzzy leaves.

Next to the plant lay the peculiarity that would draw me to the room. It was a bronze plaque, about the size of a side plate and bearing a depiction of a standing Britannia flanked by her lion. It looked like a giant, pre-decimal penny. She was quiet, though, this Britannia; her trident was held against her right shoulder as she stood with her chin inclined slightly towards her breast. In her outstretched left hand she held a wreath below which, in a neat coffer, Roman capitals spelled out a familiar name. Around the edge of the plaque were the words “He died for freedom and honour”.

“He was an uncle of your grandfather’s”, I was told. “He was killed in the First World War.”

This was the extent of anyone’s knowledge about John Weldon. This isn’t surprising. The new Irish Free State had a profound suspicion of Irishmen who had fought under the British flag and the involvement of a family member in the Crown forces was, and indeed remains, a subject often avoided. This cold, heavy thing bearing the name of a dead Irish soldier, his story unknown and unspoken of, became a source of fascination for me. Against the ticking of the mantle clock in that room, I would pick it up and inspect it, turning it over in my hands. Occasionally, I would bring it to my grandmother’s kitchen and cover it in HP sauce in an effort to clean it. The evidence of my enthusiastic polishing is still apparent in its slightly worn look.

My interest in the dead man’s penny never went away. When, some years ago, the UK National Archives made the index of the British war records searchable online, I decided to see could I find out anything about John. There were two possible matches; of these, one, an Irishman and the most likely candidate, had put forward his father as next of kin and this name didn't match. The other was an Australian infantryman, an ANZAC from New South Wales.

The Australian seemed unlikely to be my relative, but I knew that my grandfather’s family had shared a trait that could bring it within the bounds of possibility. The Weldons were wanderers, a family of seafarers whose trade reflected the unsettled character shared by those with a tinge of salt in their blood, a character which I have inherited. The notion of an Irishman finding himself on the other side of the world and enlisting in the Australian army seemed entirely Weldon-like. My mother shared this view. “I remember my mother talking about him coming home from some place he’d been working." she said.  "Apparently he had a gold nugget in his pocket, wherever he’d got that from…”

In 2002, I visited the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and located the familiar name in the courtyard where the fallen Australians are remembered. At the close of the day, a bugler played the Last Post and, as I stood and listened, I wondered if the gold in John's pocket had come from the fields of Victoria or New South Wales. 

Three years later, I was living and working in London. Nearing ANZAC day, I mentioned to an Australian colleague the possibility that my relative may have been an Australian soldier. “You should check it out online”, he said. “They’ve just made the Australian war records available on the internet”. I accessed the Australian War Graves website that day fully expecting to draw a blank, but in running my search, I felt as if I had performed a tiny alchemy. The dead man’s penny became a memorial again, not just to a half familiar name, but to John Weldon of Clontarf in Dublin, who died fighting for the new nation of Australia in the mud of Passchendaele in September 1917.

As I read the details of his war record, a picture of the final act of that lost life began to emerge. In October 1916, John Weldon, all five feet four inches of him, blue-eyed and with a scar clearly marking the bridge of his nose, walked into a recruiting office in Dubbo, New South Wales and enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force. By way of address, he  wrote simply “C/O Post Office, Forbes, N.S.W.”, his next of kin was his brother Pat, far away on the other side of the World. John had tried to enlist before but had been rebuffed due to poor eyesight. As the fearsome efficiencies of modern warfare began to tear through the young men on the fronts, however, the recruiting sergeants were becoming less picky. He swore his oath and signed his name and less than one year later, John was dead.

Over the next few days, I cross-referenced records of various types. The first real feeling of narrative arrived with the discovery that John wasn’t the only one to enlist at Dubbo that day. There was at least one other, and he was an Irishman.

PJ O’Loughlin was a tall, solid, twenty-eight year old bachelor from Corkscrewhill in Co. Clare, dark haired and with a pale complexion unsuited to the Australian sun. At six feet one inches and thirteen stones, he would have stood head and shoulders above most other men at the time. It's easy to picture the two of them, the diminutive Dubliner and the big Clareman arriving together to join up. Why they did so is impossible to know. Neither was particularly young - John was 34, exactly the same age as I am now – and neither was married. It seems unlikely that that they would have been motivated by any sense of duty to the Empire: John was from a family with close Fenian connections and now, barely six months after the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, he was enlisting to fight for Britain. PJ had grown up in an area that had been decimated by the Great Famine, an event which, at that time, had only recently faded from living memory and to this day elicits strong feelings of resentment. There is no doubt, however, that enlisting would have provided instantaneous employment and a possible route back to Europe and to their families.

Wrestling on board John's ship, the SS Benalla on way to ANZAC landing

What we do know for certain is that they both sailed on the same troop ship, H.M.A.T. Benalla, from Circular Quay in Sydney on the 9th November 1916. They spent Christmas at sea and arrived at Devonport in January. An indication of PJ’s feelings for the situation in which ne now found himself can be gleaned from his service record at this point. He was court-martialed in England on two charges; the first going AWOL for eight days before being apprehended by military police in Waterford, the second, amazingly, “attempting to escape from escort by jumping from train whilst in motion”. Hardly the actions of a man who was joining up to fight for King and Country. In PJ’s case, it seems that he just wanted to go home.

Details are sparse after PJ’s jump for freedom. They would have gone about their basic training and had periods of leave before they were both shipped off to Le Havre. Some months later, they were thrown together again as part of the same group of reinforcements, ending up in August 1917 in the ANZAC camp at Dickebusch in Belgium. When they arrived, the weather was appalling and it stayed that way for weeks. Most will have mental images of soldiers slogging through impossible amounts of mud, the classic visual cliché of the First World War. That was Passchendaele.

In the sodden August and September days that preceded what would come to be known as the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge, the war diaries of their unit show little front line activity. It is likely that they would have spent their days performing ancillary duties or sitting in camp listening to the monstrous bombardment, only half a mile away, that presaged the coming offensive. They may even have been able to watch the clouds of poison gas that were sent drifting toward the German batteries on the afternoon of 17th September.

The war diary for the day after the gas attack is not particularly dramatic. There are no specific references to casualties – only officers were named in the diaries – and in terms of activity there are mentions only of reconnaissance. It was not a particularly noteworthy day. As far as I can tell from my own research there were only two casualties in the unit on that day; one was my grand-uncle, John Weldon from Dublin, the other was PJ O’Loughlin from County Clare.

Of their deaths there are no details. The only clue comes in the page of John’s record which records his last will and testament. This page is a typed transcription of the will, which would have been stored in his paybook and held on his person at all times. There are sections that are clearly missing and the typist has faithfully recorded the fragmentary words. There is a handwritten note explaining that the original copy of the will was “mutilated”.

There are no neat gravestones that mark the spot where the two men lie. Their records do have a burial reference, but enlisted men were often buried where they fell and in the bombardments and churning mud of Passchendaele, their resting places were lost. There is a photograph from the time which will be familiar to many and is dated October 1917, some weeks after my great uncle was killed. It shows five Australian soldiers amid the hellish environment which consumed John and PJ’s graves.

The background shows a grotesque parody of a woodland, the brutalized trees rising thorough the mist, their branches stripped bare and pointing skyward in what looks for all the world like a gesture of dying supplication. Duck boards snake across the mud, dividing the picture like a crack, and along that fracture five Australians walk. They are not marching or hurrying; there is no evidence of intent in their gait; indeed, one of them appears to have stopped to watch the photographer. The image seems the very soul of loneliness and desolation, and yet one can still imagine the consolation and hope that each of these men took in each other’s companionship. One can bring to mind the talk of home or of family, picture the proffered and accepted cigarette and the other countless, continuing, life-affirming necessities of human interaction, their voices marked with the drawl of the former colonies or with the accents of the old countries.

That John and PJ met must be considered a certainty; that they were friends is a matter of conjecture, though the interweaving of the details of that final year of their lives makes that connection a logical one. It seems likely that John and PJ died side by side, fighting for a country that was not their own, the last, tragic scene in an adventure that took them to the far side of the world and back again. To Australians and New Zealanders, the sacrifice of their soldiers, their "diggers", was a bloody coming of age of their nations where all debts to the Empire which created them were paid off in full. John Weldon and PJ O'Loughlin can rightfully claim their place in the grand epic of nationhood, but that tale is one that was created in the years following the war when their story, a simpler and more human one, had run its course. By then, they had already lost the light. It is difficult to know what concept these two Irishmen would have had of the freedom and honour for which, their families were told, they had given their lives.

I have as yet been unable to locate a memorial for PJ. Relatively speaking, John is fortunate, if fortunate is the correct word: in addition to his corner of that quiet courtyard in Canberra where I stood for the Last Post, John is also commemorated on a panel on the Menin Gate in Ypres. And from time to time I wonder if, somewhere beneath a Belgian field, in a spot that shall be forever Ireland, lies a little nugget of Australian gold.

7089 Private John WELDON

3rd Battalion (Infantry) Australian Imperial Force

January 1882 - 18 September 1917

100 Words: The Stranger

Generally speaking, any critique of my writing begins with the words "this could use an edit". With so many things, improvement comes only when challenged and a rather nice writing challenge was laid down recently by Mr. London Street, specifically to write an engaging blog post using 100 words or less.

This is probably the closest I'll get to pared-down prose.

********************

In gentler times, I might have seen an announcement, formal and nondescript, in the back pages of a newspaper.

These days, everything’s connected. No more shoebox full of photographs for the wistful, late-night life review; now it’s a website with its intangible, swirling starling-cloud of digital pictures, shared and half-forgotten memories.

Hyperlinked together, we’re at a dinner party, laughing. No contact for years, but the tags are still in place at the bottom of the screen next to her thumbnail picture. Even at this tiny resolution, I recognise her face.

What I don't recognise is her name.

Declan

The teacher is recalled to my mind as something of a stereotype: Farah slacks, shirt, tie, tank top or plain-coloured jumper, balding. I remember his cheeks, crazed by a filigree of fine, red capillaries. Above them sat a pair of wire-framed spectacles which, on rare occasions, he would remove and polish on a fold of his jumper as we stared at the vulnerable-looking man revealed.

He was a former member of the Christian Brothers, but at some stage had renounced his vows and become a teacher in the State system. When he became angry, which was a regular occurrence, you could see the tension spread through him. His eyes would open slightly wider behind his glasses and he would flick his chin to one side like a jackdaw. “You fellas…” he would repeat over and over, barely suppressing what was rising within.“You fellas…”

Sometimes, it seemed, he would just give in to his anger and let himself rage, screaming at the room full of children before him. I wonder now if he had initially nurtured that anger so it could be wielded like a weapon when required, but over the years had somehow lost mastery of it and, from time to time, was consumed by it.

There was a kid in my class called Declan who was from a tough part of town. He had close-cropped ginger hair, gelled forward like a working-class Caesar and would occasionally turn up to school dressed in a sateen track suit, apparently on a whim. He was cocky, agressive and noisy and frequently in trouble with the school authorities. At the same time, I remember him as essentially good humoured, with an easy smile and an endless desire to talk about Liverpool Football Club. He had a precocious swagger and a hard edge to his personality and I liked him for it.

Academically, Declan struggled. As part of our homework, we were regularly set passages to read before a public examination the next day. Under normal circumstances, he would speak with that rapid-fire variety of Dublin accent that starts at the back of the throat and seems to be articulated somewhere behind the nose. On those occasions when Declan was asked to read aloud, however, it was as if his personality simply fell away. All trace of bravado was forgotten, and he would falter and stumble as he followed the words on the page with his forefinger, his face creased with concentration.

From these primary school days, a single incident stands out above all other memories. I remember it with a clarity that allows me to replay it again and again as if on a cine projector. Declan, on this occasion, was sitting at the next desk over from me. Once again, his reading was under scrutiny and the text clearly had not been prepared. Declan simply didn’t have the ability to read aloud convincingly without preparation, and so it was obvious when the previous night’s homework had not been done. This was a frequent occurrence.

For several minutes he labored, pointing at the words on the page with his finger, willing the shapes to coalesce into a form that he recognised and could enunciate.

Even though we were expecting it, when it came, the shouted command was startling.

- Stand up.

Declan rose to his feet, his chair scraping on the floor tiles, holding his English reader at chest height with one hand as he attempted to continue, tracing each line with the index finger of his free hand. Each missed word, each stumble became its own mini failure and corrections were barked at him by the teacher whose jaw was already set at an angle against the boy who stood in front of him.

- Did you read this last night? Did you do your homework? 

- Yes, sir.

- Is there some bloody reason you can’t read it, then? 

His voice reverberated against the painted breeze block walls and, I imagine, through the empty corridors of the school.

- No, sir.
- Yes, sir! No, sir! Three bags full, sir! Get on with it, then, sir!

Against the peculiar silence of twenty frightened ten year olds, Declan began again. Some internal mechanism desperately tried to compensate for his misfiring reading process and searched for clues in the context or in the shapes on the page. He was guessing now, almost subconsciously, it seemed; random stabs, each one highlighted by a retort from the teacher. The punishment for Declan’s failure to prepare was to be forced to read in front of his classmates, and his difficulty would be held up to ridicule.

It was hopeless. I could see the skin on his face redden as his embarrassment grew. When reading, he would enunciate his words perfectly with a docile, almost alien voice, as if the reading process was entirely separate from his internal dialogue and his normal way of speaking. Now it began to be infused with a stammer, and it was worsening. The words began to catch, to trip on his building anxiety and shatter before they could be uttered.

- What’s wrong with you? We’ve already met that word.

He tried again, panic rising, forcing the words out, never raising his head to meet the gaze of his teacher. Eventually, it was all too much and I could see him shrink slightly as his resolve melted away.

- Did I tell you to stop? What’s the next word?

His head down, Declan stared silently at the book in front of him. His free hand faltered, dropped from the page, then returned to point at the place where he had left off.

- What's the next word?

Standing on his own in the classroom, facing an adult who was shouting at him, Declan lost his fight against the tears. He turned his head to the side as we wiped his cheek with his cuff, eyes fixed firmly on the floor.

- The next word. You know it. “Brother”.

The awful, fearful silence continued unbroken.

- "Brother!" Say it!

We watched as Declan formed the word in his mouth, pressed his lips together, pointed at it with his finger, performed his habitual, physical ritual of reading which now had lost its effect. The sounds would not come, his breath trapped in his chest.

- Say it! Just say it!

The teacher was screaming now. Somehow, the prism of anger through which, at that moment, he was viewing the world, had distorted the scene before him, and Declan’s torturous silence became one more aggravating detail in an imaginary tableau of defiance. The sides of the child’s mouth fell as his breath began to come in heavy sobs that shook his shoulders

- I…. can’t.

- What do you mean you can’t? You’ve read it before. What’s wrong with you?
- I … can’t. I have a...
- You what? You have a what? 
- I have... a…. stutter.

To this day, I remember the effort with which he pronounced that final word, forcing it up from somwhere deep down in his chest, up and out from amongst the panic and the tears, and the sobs and the shame. I don’t remember much about my own feelings as I watched, no great sense of empathy or injustice. I have a recollection of a classmate voicing a protest - "Sir, he can't, he has a stutter!" -  but I can't be sure that haven't invented this to assuage my adult guilt at not speaking up on his behalf. My primary concern, I think, was to avoid becoming the focus of the teacher's anger; I remember little of his reaction after Declan’s tearful, plaintive plea, save a fleeting look of confusion. Of the resolution of the situation or the moments that followed, I remember not a thing.

Recently, I was reminded of the incident during a discussion with a friend who has taken up teaching as a second career. A fellow Irish expat, he is sometimes baffled, sometimes amused by the differences between the school environment we had gone through and the reality of state-run schooling in London. I told him the story of Declan and the teacher, and he was appalled. “That just wouldn’t happen now”, he said. Moreover, he told me, teachers were all too aware of how students, when faced with the insidious combination of a conflict-filled school environment, their own learning difficulties and an indifferent family background can quickly end up on the wrong side of the law. Teachers can see the slide beginning and gaining momentum, but were often powerless to prevent it. I immediately thought of Declan and decided to find out what had become of him.

It didn’t take me long. A cursory Google search of his name returned a slew of archived national newspaper articles, one of which was accompanied by a photo. It was a simple square-cropped head shot and slightly blurry, but the features – and the haircut – were the same. In December 2001, three months after 9/11 and while I was busy drinking my way around Australia on a working holiday visa, Declan received two consecutive sentences for membership of the Real IRA and possession of bomb making equipment. The reports indicated that he was thought to be a senior member of the organisation.

For those of you unfamiliar with the more difficult parts of recent Irish history, the Real IRA is a hard-line IRA splinter group which, in 1998, filled a Vauxhall Cavalier with 500lbs of explosives, drove it, on a busy Saturday afternoon, to the town of Omagh in Co. Tyrone and detonated it, killing 29 people, including seven under the age of 16, and injuring over 300.  That bombing represented a significant milestone in the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and one which marked the point when all sides found themselves saying “no more”.

I have no idea of the nature of the path that Declan took when our ways diverged in June 1989. It’s as impossible to quantify how he was affected by his time at school in Dublin, a time which I shared with him, as by the other significant periods and events in his life which I did not. Given the nature of the organisation of which he became a part, and that terrible act in Omagh which that organisation carried out, it's not unreasonable to wonder what made its members who they are, how they justified to themselves what they were about to do and what bloody reasons they had for what they ultimately did. I can't suggest answers to those questions, but I can tell you that they take on a certain poignancy when you realise that you once knew one of those men when he was a child, already struggling with what life was laying out before him.

Even before I read the articles, the recollection of the ten-year-old Declan would, from time to time, be called by some event to my mind, along with an attendant feeling of unease tinged with sadness and sympathy for that boy. An aspiring Dublin hard case he may have been, but he was a child who loved Liverpool FC, had challenges that I never had and, because of those challenges, was one day humiliated to the point of tears by a grown man.

I wonder does either of the two, more than twenty years later, remember that child also.

Anatomy of a Recidivist Songwriter

I was reminded just yesterday by Mr. London Street in his rather wonderful blog of a long-lost world once inhabited by me, and of the path I took which resulted in music being an important part of my life. Here is a link to that blog entry, and here is what it reminded me of...

******************

My early flirtations with the world of music ended badly. My willingness to spend thirty minutes hiding in a cupboard in order to avoid my music teacher did not bode well for my career as a pianist. At thirteen, however, my brother handed me his electric guitar and sat down opposite me, arranging the fingers of my left hand in an approximation of an E-minor chord.

There had been guitar lessons available in my primary school; Mr. Kennedy used to teach a class of four or five on Wednesday evenings and, this being Ireland, they would be wheeled out to accompany religious sing-songery, which they did with consummate smugness. To this carry-on, my levels of indifference were almost supernatural. What I was holding, though, that afternoon with my brother, was something altogether unrelated. This was a shiny, black Fender Lead II, with knobs and pickups and I could turn it up as loud as I wanted to.

As an adult, I recognize something of the obsessive in my teenage self. Socially speaking, I was a disaster. I was self absorbed, surly and withdrawn, generally disinterested in my peers. They repaid my disdain in kind. My evenings were spent sitting on the edge of an armchair, lifting the arm of my record player, placing the needle in the right groove on the spinning black vinyl. Sitting alone in a room, still wearing school uniform, bending light steel wires: rewind, listen, repeat. I would let the room grow dark around me, lit by the carbide glow from the streetlights outside my parents’ house.

Around age seventeen or so, my interest swung towards the acoustic guitar. I began to love the feel of the vibrating wood, the sensitivity that could be extracted from bronze strings by my fingertips. I would practice in front of a mirror watching my hands move, developing an admiration for the elegance of difficult chord shapes and patterns.

During my final year in school, a girl began to show an interest in me. She was small, pale and delicate with unusual, arresting features; maybe not beautiful, but with the kind of face that you might catch yourself staring at on a train. She was interested, she let me kiss her, and then, in the manner of teenage girls, she wasn't interested any more. I was devastated. Something in my gut decided this was a catastrophe, and that something was a physical, knotted presence for weeks.

One evening, after school, I dug up a vinyl copy of Inside Out by John Martyn from the pile of my brother's LP's. Lift the arm, needle in the groove. Last song, side two: So Much in Love with You.

I remember that song, the whole moment, clearly; the sound of the master tape coming up to speed at the beginning of the track, Martyn’s stumbling, yawning vocal, at times brittle and fracturing, at times a roar of frustration; Danny Thompson’s double bass with its nonchalant, sauntering counterpoint; Steve Winwood’s piano cadence like an absent-minded ellipsis.

I decided to learn to play and write.

And write I did. Awful, angst-ridden, introspective stuff at first, until life became more textured. I started going to songwriters’ nights where I met earnest, intense people who sang lyrics that were sometimes profound, often ill-considered and occasionally just bizarre.

There were individuals who would strap on their guitars and smile beatifically, raising their eyes to the rafters before unleashing torrents of ineffable crap. There was a gentleman called Ernie who each week would produce the most magnificent guitars, hand-crafted beauties all of them. Ernie had a playing style that revolved around almost punching his instrument as if he were trying to beat the music out of it. He would regularly include a song rather magnificently entitled "You're Just a Prick in a Volvo".

There was a lawyer who wrote wonderful lyrics and would express frustration to any who would listen that he was known as a musical barrister, rather than a musician who practiced law. Another character would brutalise his own songs with a passion that would hold the attention of everyone in the room like a vice. A strange woman of a certain age in a kaftan and chiffon scarves would sing in eerie, reedy tones like a musical saw before coyly acknowledging the applause from the floor.

There was gold there too, though, in those pubs on the Southside of Dublin. Little bits of poignancy and soulfulness leaked through the dross. Once, I followed a skinny, young Damien Rice to the microphone and wished I hadn't bothered.

Most of the magic was supplied by a man called John who was in a different class to the rest of us. At the time, he worked in a bank on the Quays. In the evening, he’d go home and craft beautiful songs, suffused with lightness and depth, that you’d swear you’d heard before. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he’d deliver them in a voice made to be listened to late at night. John spotted something in my playing, and would invite me to sit in and play part of his set with him. He tolerated and encouraged me, though in truth, I was pretty poor.

And then, one day, I wasn’t. I had written a new song, putting the finishing touches to it on the train, and decided to try it out. I disappeared a little bit when I was singing. I finished the song and there was a roar. They were mostly songwriters themselves, undeniably over-supportive, but they whistled and applauded. I didn’t know what to do, so I sat down and finished my pint.

I often think of those characters, some ten, twelve years behind me. They were oddballs, but then again, so am I. It wasn’t about the playing, or even about the song; it was a kind of good-natured, non-invasive primal scream for the creative urbanite. I would beat myself up over a fluffed chord change or a forgotten lyric; they sounded as if they were making it up as they went along, and I'm pretty sure that at times, they were. I've no doubt that nearly all of them would have been prepared to die for their art; I just suspect they’d have drawn the line at doing a bit of practice. Those nights were like some through-the-looking-glass X-Factor, where the eccentrics take to the stage, sing badly for five minutes, then politely tell the judges to go fuck themselves.

Performance, by its nature, invites critique and criticism. The open-mic community wasn't a real audience, but one which offered what amounted, at least publicly, to unconditional support. For the most part, we had songs only a mother or or hobbyist songwriter could love, and every week we would sing them for one another. I still perform, and every so often I disappear again. 

Songwriting gives me a certain self-awareness, a perspective that allows the ability to be bemused by my own folly. I still practice and I still write, sitting with pen and paper and the occasional bottle of whiskey, hunched over my guitar, letting the room grow dark as the carbide glare from the street light outside my window is caught in the raindrops and speckles the glass with points of orange-yellow light.

A Sunday in July

Had there been anyone else other than me there, you might have said that the comment was intended for nobody in particular.

- Jeez, boy, it's awful quiet, isn’t it?

I look up towards Richmond Bridge from my spot near the slipway. The guy in the ice-cream van looks bored. It’s a Sunday evening in July and there are not a whole lot of people here at all.

- Could make a cameo at The Ship, I suggest.

Eddie’s already half way up Waterman’s Lane. He has that look in his eye. We don’t quite make it to the train station; he’s spotted one of his landlord buddies and the doorway is only very briefly darkened before he makes his presence felt inside.

- Alright Eddie! Bloody quiet, ain’t it?

- Ya! We were just down by the water. There’s nobody around at all.

He rubs his hands together and it's not long before he's in full flight. I get them in and don’t get involved.

I mind the gap as we’re getting off at Wandsworth Town. We negotiate the traffic and McDonald’s car park, sidle past the bus depot, hang a left down toward the cement works and wonder how the crowd at the end of Jews Row ever managed to find their way here in the first place. 

Someone has spread out a Persian rug on the tarmac in the middle of the roadway outside the pub. On it a couple of leather couches sit within Pimm’s pouring distance of each other. I turn to pass comment to Eddie, but I've been abandoned. I just manage to catch sight of his chrome dome disappearing into the pub. I follow him and make it inside in time to see him nip through the doorway into the main bar. By the time I make it through, he’s already chatting to Charlie and Phil.

- Howaryiz, lads, says Charlie. Jeez, it’s a bit quiet isn’t it?

I look around. There are a couple of tables left inside. Some kid in skinny jeans is in the process of moving one of them to replace it with a couple of guitar cases and an amp. Outside, it’s standing room only on the rug.

- Quiet for here, maybe, Charlie. I think you’ve got just about the entire London pub trade. What’s the story with the carpet?

- Ah, ya know. Thought it might be a laugh. Had a couple of lamps and a TV out there earlier but took them in because we thought it might rain.

I’m not sure if he’s serious. He scampers off behind the bar and starts polishing something, grins back in our direction. Phil tosses his hair and wafts off somewhere. Eddie’s beaming. He nods towards the bar.

- Pint bottle of cider. No ice.

It’s getting dark, now. The place is buzzing. I’m buzzing. Eddie’s being controversial about something and I’m pretty sure he’s winding me up. The band can’t decide between posing and rock-and-rolling until the guitarist starts the intro of Sex on Fire. Emma’s sitting on other side of Charlie’s exterior living room arrangement. She has beautiful brown eyes and she’s a writer. That doesn’t seem to do it justice though. Writeuse, maybe... I tell Eddie I’m going to the jacks and skip over to say hello. I don’t make the grand and witty entrance that I merit, though. Mind you, I never do. I’m back a few minutes later.

Oisin arrives for a late one. He’s amused at what his staff have been up to with the carpet and the couches. It seems everyone else is too, particularly the Brylcream and GHD couple who are sprawled out in full pizza-and-DVD mode. It starts when you get to the top of Jews Row and you realise you’ve stumbled upon the place where those red tour buses live. By the time you get to the bottom, it’s all a bit lively and you feel a bit like you’re doing something your headmaster wouldn’t have approved of.

It’s closing time, and I’ve almost a full pint left. No rush - nobody’s going to swipe it and tell me to go home and iron my shirt for the morning. I look across to the writeuse and I formulate the witty observation or bon mot that I’ll leave until too late to deliver.

A few days later the phone rings, and a few days after that I’m stepping out of an airport into a blast of hot air that makes me turn my face away. Utah. No footpaths. Off licenses run by the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Can I see your ID, sir? The locals don’t recognise my accent and politely ask me where I’m from.

- Ireland, I say.

- Iowa?

- No, Ireland.

- Oh! Yeah... Is it as hot there as it is here during the summer?

In these parts, they have greeters at the supermarket who offer you a mobility scooter with built-in basket to carry your Cheerios and tell you that they miss you already as you leave. There's a Mexican restaurant where the staff ring a brass bell and cheer when you ask for extra cheese on your burrito. They’re mannerly and courteous and I might as well be from Mars.

I couldn’t face the palaver tonight. I’m in my apartment drinking light beer from a can and watching the sun go down over some scrubby sun-burnt hills.

I could do with a pint. In a glass. In a pub.