The deepening coastal shelf of... parenthood

The ghost of Philip Larkin followed me home from Sainsbury's the other day.

Over by the cheese counter in the grey empty middle of a Sunday afternoon, I passed a woman struggling with her two boys. The oldest one had plonked himself down in the pram in place of his tired younger brother – and she was trying to encourage him to his feet, while coaxing the younger one back into the pram.

Eventually the older one got up, but by now the younger one wouldn't sit down. The possibility arose that the pair of them might suddenly run off and roam the aisles in a circuitous, destructive escape bid - while she pushed an empty pram for hours down the canyons between the shelves, calling their names in vain.

-  Will you sit down? She asked – and he complained and refused.

- Please sit down, she implored him.

And still he refused. I saw her shoulders slump.

- If I give you money, will you sit down?

And she began to rummage in her purse for change.

I got through the checkout and headed for the exit. Ahead of me, an enormous woman was pushing a trolley, packed mountainously high with groceries. This was a large woman in her early 30s – with a stern, long-suffering look, about six feet tall, rolls of fat and muscle across her shoulders and torso. Ahead of her, her husband pushed a similar trolley, also packed to the bows with teetering, loose bags of shopping.

He was also large – a big, shapeless guy with swinging limbs and a kind of beaten, defeated look. In front of him, in the little folding seat of the trolley, his little boy was leaning over backwards, attempting to grab tasty items out of the shopping bags. His father, muttering under his breath, was snatching the bags and jars from his grasp, and putting them back into the bags with one hand, and trying to keep the trolley moving with the other.

Between him and his wife, their little girl sat down heavily on one of the chairs near the café.

- Move, you, said the mother to the daughter.

The little girl, tired and with a slightly mischievous look, stayed where she was and thought about disobedience.

- MOVE!! Roared her mother suddenly, the Sunday afternoon shoppers glancing over as they loaded their own trolleys.

- MOVE… Or be DRAGGED.

And up she got, maybe six years old, and headed for the exit between the trolleys, and back to the family home, to fill the cupboards and the freezer and the fridge, until the same time next week.

Snap by snap - a bridge that leads back to home

My cousin Siobhan and her husband Robert recently scanned, snap by snap, a treasure chest of old photographs that had belonged to my mother and father, and recently they gave me a memory stick with literally hundreds of images on it. Many of them were their own, but there were dozens of mum and dad's shots on there. I'm hugely grateful to them for this - it must have taken days to get through them all.

It has been a joy to go through them - like Christmas morning when you got that big fat annual, packed with comic strips - and you couldn't put it down.

(The pictures above are - my mother and I outside the back door of our first real 'house' at 6 Hawthorn Place, Harpur's Hill, Coleraine; My mother and father and I with my paternal grandmother Mary Toner, at Churchill Park, Coleraine; my mother's family, with her parents Robert and Margaret (I think my mum is on the far right) near their home on the Murder Hole Road between Coleraine and Limavady; and my mother, I think outside her first job, at a bakery on Railway Road in Coleraine, late 50s early 60s)

What is revealed, actually, is the messy, big-hearted sprawl that a family can make over the years - they spread themselves out over the years and the seasons and the townlands and the occasions. There are pictures here from the 30s, right up through four, maybe even five generations. And there are mystery faces among the black and whites, some amazing fashions and just... smiles for miles. My mother and family both came from big families (11 on each side), and when they got together to celebrate, these people took up a LOT of room.

My parents took photographs at almost every occasion - and our house always had a drawer full of those big-bellied Belmont Photographic envelopes, packed with amateur snaps of the weddings of my million cousins. When you scrolled through the pictures, they would always start off with people looking fantastic, wonderfully dressed and groomed outside churches, and always end in pictures of chaos - bottles, cans, cigarettes, ties at half mast, eyes glazed. They had an enormous talent for having a good time, my folks.

Now that my mother is gone, and my father is increasingly out of reach, these pictures are a bridge back for me. And not a tearful journey, either - I have a sense of joy and love looking back at these snaps. I mostly remember having a good time - we loved each other and we ALL had a pretty good time, actually, and I think the pictures tell that story.

Next gig - in the round with Matt McGinn and Ken Haddock, Banbridge, Sat Oct 17

Next Saturday, Saturday October 17 at 8pm, Anthony appears 'In the Round' in the fine company of Matt McGinn and Ken Haddock, in a special one-off concert at Banbridge Town Hall. All the details are included here, in this page from the Arts Programme:

Poor Blue - Mickey stands up in public again

The truth is, sometimes you're just a little too late...

 It was so long ago, I could probably fake it, and claim I was right there, at the front corner of the bar near the stage (my feet sticking to the carpet), when the spark of punk set the cobwebs on fire at Spuds in Portstewart.

But the fact is... the Punk thing kind of passed me by, as a live phenomenon anyway. Sure, Rudi and The Outcasts might have played Spuds, but by the time I was just underage enough to blag my way in out of the rain, the circus had already left town.

I was 17, stretched out on the teenage rack of boredom, acne, exams and an enormous melancholy. I took refuge in post-Punk Spuds – The Perfect Crime. International Rescue. The tasty musicianship of bands like Southbound Train, B4, Richmond Hill.

And then I heard The Mighty Shamrocks. And for that year, I caught every gig they played at Spuds. It was the only live music venue I knew. I had virtually no pocket money. But I saved what I could, and once or twice WALKED from Harpur's Hill to Portstewart - and hitched home again in the dark - to hear this band.

Why? 

The Mighty Shamrocks - pic by Keith Gilmore

It's hard to define in retrospect. I remember shapes they threw - chins jutting, leather jackets, tinted glasses. Skinny ties. A Roland Jazz Chorus amp. A worn-out Telecaster. 

The guitar player sounded like The Pretenders. The rhythm section sounded like Some Girls-era Stones. The singer sounded like Bob Geldof fighting for the mic with Willie De Ville. 

I remember 'Breaking up with Harry' most of all. Like 'Reelin in the Years' being sneered by Blonde on Blonde Dylan. The charts were full of image-conscious New Romantics, preening and pouting. And here, in this seaside pub lounge, was this scruffy quartet singing oblique songs about Mexican fishermen and referencing Coronation Street and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I was hooked – these were actual SONGS. Pop had become so rarefied and refined almost out of its own existence by then – we were in a high-altitude world, all mirrors and image and attitude, and the oxygen was pretty scarce. The song structures had thinned out, too - become little more than skeletons. Coat hangers. Skittery little drum patterns and nervy, processed vocals and guitars. 

The Shamrocks seemed three dimensional in comparison. I bought the single - 'Condor Woman & 'Stand Up in Public', and waited for the LP. The band went into Homestead Studios with Mudd Wallace and recorded and album for Good Vibrations. But-

The one and only single... Condor Woman.

The truth is, sometimes you're just a little too late...

The taxman came after the label, the project got shelved and the band went their separate ways - bassist Roe Butcher and guitarist Dougie Gough to other musical projects; frontman Mickey Stephens to academia in the United States and Paddy McNichol (until his untimely death) as manager of the fabled venue Connolly's of Leap down in Cork).

Thanks to fellow Shamrocks fan Fran McCloskey, who had a digital copy, the album, now called 'Paddy', was finally released a couple of years ago. There were a couple of celebration gigs, with Paddy's son on the drums, sparks that could have started fires, and the players separated again.

Now here comes Mickey Stephens again, sounding like he's never been gone, with a new project, Poor Blue, and an album You're Welcome. It's not the Shamrocks - and of course, it shouldn't be - what would be the point? But every now and then when he opens his throat and I hear that yelp, I'm transported. 

The swagger remains - he was always a writer blessed with a beautiful reading list and enormous confidence, and on character studies like 'Worth Your Time', he really goes for broke. Top of my list is 'Good for You Daddy', a wonderful lowlife portrait that relies on acoustic guitar and Mickey's delivery.

And the rest of it is laced with brawny Telecaster bite, big drums, Stonesy riffs and memorable turns of phrase. Check out their Facebook page to catch videos and recordings from the band. Copies of the album are available from Head Records and Sick Records in Belfast - and I'm told that copies of 'Paddy' will be available there soon, too, all these years later, You can also download the album from Amazon and you can buy copies by clicking on the CDBaby link here: http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/PoorBlue.

Epilogue:

 Rewind - back to shortly after where we came in. It's early 1985. I'm a teenage dad, out of work and living on an edge-of-town housing estate, miles from the housing estate I grew up in. I've become distanced from my family and friends. Word from home tells me that Spuds is closing. The Shamrocks are gone, the punks have gone. All the people I went to school with seem to have gone. The bands I wanted to form have all fallen to ruins. On some February nights, when the bedtime stories are finished and my little girl has gone to sleep, I find myself slipping into the spare room, picking up the acoustic guitar and quietly starting to work on some song ideas. For the first six months, every one of them sounds like 'Breaking up with Harry'.

The truth is, sometimes you're just a little too late.

Rock Goes to College, 1983 - The Mighty Shamrocks perform Breaking Up With Harry and Condor Woman.

Goat's Milk - a cause for celebration

When I was 12 or 13 (and still kind of friendless) at Coleraine Inst, I would spend most lunchtimes indoors, wandering the shelves of the big library at the school. Like everything else in my first couple of years at that school, the room seemed enormous and complicated to me, with a balcony, and imposing portraits of former headmasters glowering down on damp teenagers hiding from the rain, reading the Daily Mirror.

  I didn’t want conversation – I hadn’t found my tongue yet (that would come later). So I had little to say about football or The Clash, and would avoid everyone by hiding out in the baked-dust gloom under the balcony, near the radiator, in the one section nobody else wanted to browse – poetry.

  I’d read RL Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verse as a youngster, and craved those rhythms, I suppose. Something soothing and comprehensible and bite-sized. Something I could understand and make my own, in a world that seemed about to overwhelm me with its strange rules and unknowable historical significance. And something you could slip into conversation. A name you could drop that would separate you out from the rest of your world. So I would randomly grab slim volumes of poetry from the school library and take them home, and scratch my head in bafflement at the work of poets like WS Merwin and John Berryman.

  By the time I left school and found myself in the big bad world beyond, poetry was something I felt I had to leave behind – a luxury that would have to wait, somehow. But in the late 80s, in some second hand bookshop somewhere, I chanced upon a gorgeous thing: a used copy of A Northern Spring by Frank Ormsby. It had a delicious print of a warplane flying over a rural landscape on the front in blue, and simple lettering. It looked inviting and serious and calm all at the same time, somehow.

  The central title ‘suite’ is a series of poems spoken by the dead GIs who landed in Normandy on D-Day, in remembrance of their time spent in Fermanagh, preparing for the invasion. I was completely hooked on the idea that each poem came from a different soul, told a different story, but that all of the stories added up to a larger, enormously sad narrative. It was one of those books you read that you never quite recover from.

  When I first started writing songs a few years later, I was conscious that I could inhabit other souls, like Ormsby had done. I loved the idea of putting my arms into the sleeves of someone else’s coat and telling their story. It became – and remains - a big influence on me, and I recommend it constantly to other songwriters, as a personal touchstone.

  Over the years, I have returned time and time again to A Northern Spring, and I’ve read Ormsby in a number of anthologies – his recent collection, Fireflies, is also a classic.

Anthony Toner meets Frank Ormsby - at No Alibis

  On Friday past, as I arrived at No Alibis, I noticed a new Ormsby collection on display – Goat’s Milk: New and Selected Poems, published by Bloodaxe. I immediately told David Torrans I was having a copy of that, and purchased it. And as we were setting up for the concert, I recited a couple of poems and announced that I wanted to read a couple of them during the show, and plug the upcoming launch – at The McMordie Hall in Queens on March 25.

  After the soundcheck I went off for a bite to eat, and when I came back, David said: ‘Guess who’s coming to the gig tonight?’ He had called Frank and invited him to the show. And so it was that Frank Ormsby got to be my special guest at No Alibis on Friday evening, reading a couple of poems from the new collection. What a gentleman. What a writer. What an evening – a real high point of my performing life.

  Now... If you like what I do, you’ll love what Frank Ormsby does – there’s a direct influence. I urge you to call at No Alibis (on Botanic Avenue in Belfast) and pick up a copy of Goat’s Milk (which has an introduction by Michael Longley, and which contains many of the delightful poems from A Northern Spring - and some glorious new works, too), or even better, come along to the McMordie Hall in the School of Music at Queen’s on Wednesday March 25 at 6.30pm, when No Alibis will host the launch event. I’ll be there, in continuing celebration of this man’s work, which continues to move and delight me.

  For more details on the Goat’s Milk launch event, get in touch with No Alibis directly on (028) 9031 9601.

The new album, Miles & Weather - stream the whole album here

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Street suss serenade

Cornmarket, pushing my bike through the post-festive throngs today, everybody in the doldrums, the in-between days of Christmas and the New Year. Suddenly I’m distracted by the sound of somebody singing. That’s not unusual - there are always buskers around that part of the city. In fact, it seems to have become a welcome space for public spectacle – clowns and street entertainers, buskers with Mumford-y beards, little kids with squalling electric guitars, the amazing drummer who plays the empty paint pots, musicians miming to panpipe music, etc.

But this guy was different – he had drawn a crowd. He had set up some kind of MP3 player and an amplifier outside the front doors of British Home Stores, belting out karaoke backing tracks. And he stood out in front of it in a camel coat, with a straw hat on the pavement in front of him, and just... wailed.

I watched him for about ten minutes. Old showtunes, Elvis numbers, 60s hits, he bellowed them all out, throwing his head back, waving his arms and moving around the space he had created. Every now and then a pretty girl would go past and he would gesticulate, offering the performance to her alone. The crowd around him would grow and then retreat, in that unfathomable logic of crowds, where everybody suddenly, wordlessly agrees they’ve stood for too long and they instantly disperse.

But periodically his audience would swell to thirty or forty people, and they would stand in a circle, smiling, just amazed at the energy he gave it. No instrument, no costume. Just his voice. When he didn’t know the words, he approximated them with home-made sounds of his own.

In other words, he was not to be stopped.

I bent over to throw a quid in the hat, and noticed that it was already two thirds full of £1 and 50p coins. Which tells us something, I think – fortune favours the brave. Who dares wins. Something along those lines. I’ve heard a lot of buskers this year – and I’ve made donations to most of them – but this one I’ll remember, because something about his bravado made me smile.

Sliding on Latter Day Sinner

The first time I saw Matt McGinn – who has a lovely new album out that you should buy – was at one of those shows people used to do in the Black Box where a cast of thousands play all the songs from a big album – they had already done Harvest, I think, and Astral Weeks and Fisherman’s Blues, and now it was the turn of The Last Waltz.

Matt McGinn by Joanne Ham Photography

The afternoon (it was a long affair, this) was hosted by the irreplaceable and much-missed Gerry Anderson, who arrived in a fluster having locked the keys inside his Mercedes. Someone from a garage on the Boucher Road had broken into his car and got his keys and charged him £160. ‘I could have left my car in half a dozen places in Belfast,’ he told me, ‘and got that done for nothing.’

  Gerry started everything off with a rousing welcome and launched into a spirited version of ‘Who Do You Love?’. I was on early, playing a solo version of ‘Such a Night’ by Dr. John on acoustic guitar. I seem to remember feeling very out place, very subdued among the rackets being generated by people like Jackson Cage and Captain Kennedy and co. But the craic was great.

  Anyway, half way through the first set, on came Matt McGinn and tore the place up with a raw version of ‘The Shape I’m In’. I’d heard his name (it’s a great name, blessed with its own rhythm and bounce on the tongue), but it was the first time I’d heard him perform and I thought he was wonderful. Andrea thought he looked like a happy dancing bear.

  Over the years, I’ve come to know Matt well, and we’ve done a few gigs and broadcasts together here and there. On his debut album, Livin’, he asked me to play some slide guitar and I showed up at his house badly hungover and attempted to put some licks down over a pretty complicated arrangement. I went home convinced I had let the side down, but when the track came out, he had cut and spliced something wonderful out of it. I tell you, it bore little resemblance to what I offered him that afternoon.

Latter Day Sinner by Matt McGinn

  It was good enough though, that he asked me back, and I’m thrilled to have been part of his latest album, the delicious Latter Day Sinner. Once again I’m playing slide guitar, on a song called ‘We’re Fine’, with my playing weaving in and out between harmonica licks from the legendary Mickey Raphael. I think it’s the sweetest song on the collection, but then I would say that. There are some harmonies on ‘Fall into You’ that just make me swoon. And I’m not much of a swooner anymore.

  It’s a lovely collection, recorded with warmth and heart and it deserves to be heard by as many of you as possible. Click HERE to order a copy. And click HERE if you’d like to watch a video featuring some selections from the album. And if you’re a downloader and you only want one track, ‘We’re Fine’ is, er... (cough) the one I’d go for...

  And if you'd like to see the man perform in person, and pick up a copy of the album from Matt himself, he's appearing at McGrory's in Culdaff on November 13, at the Downshire Arms in Hilltown on November 15, St. George's Church in High Street Belfast on November 19 and Abner Brown's in Dublin on November 26.

  I can't guarantee that he will dance like a happy bear at any of those gigs, but maybe if you ask him he might oblige.

For National Poetry Day

'For Tess'

by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver

Out on the Strait the water is whitecapping
As they say here. It’s rough and I’m glad
I’m not out. Glad I fished all day
on Morse Creek, casting a red Daredevil back
and forth. I didn’t catch anything. No bites 
even, not one. But it was okay. It was fine!
I carried your dad’s pocketknife and was followed
for awhile by a dog its owner called Dixie.
At times I felt so happy I had to quit
fishing. Once I lay on the bank with my eyes closed,
listening to the sound the water made,
and to the wind in the tops of the trees. The same wind
that blows out on the Strait, but a different wind, too.
For awhile I even let myself imagine that I had died -
and that was all right, at least for a couple 
of minutes, until it really sank in: Dead.
As I was laying there with my eyes closed,
just after I’d imagined what it might be like
if in fact I never got up again, I thought of you.
I opened my eyes then and got right up
and went back to being happy again
I’m grateful to you, you see. I wanted to tell you.

Cheeky face

A journal post from last year: In the coffee shop this morning, a young mother and her friend are complaining to each other about relatives, while her son runs around the café, as kids will do, picking things up and putting them down, his little trainers pounding on the fake wood floor.

  I’ve just come from the doctor, whose confirms my suspicion – this cold has gifted me a perforated eardrum, so I’m sensitive to every noise: her barked orders at the child, the steam from the cappuccino maker, even (God bless him) the youngster’s thin, wet little cough, which sounds in my bad ear like a cheap roller skate being thrown down the stairs.

  ‘Show Tracey your cheeky face,’ she says to her boy, who stands by their table and pulls a face. The women laugh. ‘Show her your cross face… Show her your happy face.’

  The little boy grimaces at them repeatedly. They’re all the same face.

To Kill A Mockingbird - revisited

(On Sunday May 11, Andrea and I went with my daughter Sian and her boyfriend Bob to the Queen's Film Theatre to see 'To Kill A Mockingbird' on the big screen)

Oceans of ink have already been spilled on the subject of To Kill a Mockingbird, so there’s really no reason for me to pour my thimbleful over the side of this boat.

  But I can’t help myself. What is it about this film that peels me open every time?

Atticus Finch and the children are confronted by the lynch mob

  Certainly the central performance by Gregory Peck is a towering example of dignity, courage, integrity and strong, loving parenting. I have to say that Atticus Finch is the yardstick I set myself some time ago as a father.

(I know. It’s an impossible standard to measure up to, but you have to aim for something. There are a number of things that will bring me out in a cold sweat in the small hours of the night. And the thought that I might have been a bad parent is one of them. So I look to Atticus as one of the role models)

  The sense of lost childhood is also stronger every time I see the movie – the narration, the idea that this whole thing is already a memory. That’s highlighted, I think, by the soundtrack, which hints at nursery rhyme structures now and then.

  Also the look of the film – the overhanging trees, the creaking verandahs, the fallen leaves, the warm darkness... It’s a childhood world seen in memory. It has an unreal quality, like the whole street – the trees and yards and houses – was created in a vast film studio lot - indoors - and lit to look like reality, but feels instead like something you dreamed.

  It’s an archetypal southern landscape too, all those heatstruck ladies and the kindly black maids, front porches and screen doors, chirping crickets and tree houses. People sitting outdoors at night on a porch swing, fanning themselves in courthouses, the rattling cars, the pocket watches and waistcoats.

  It has been many years since I saw the film, and Sunday past was my first time to see it on a big screen. It has lost none of its power to move me. Almost from the minute they put Tom Robinson on the stand through to the last line... ‘he would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning’ - I’m in tatters.

  What do I weep for? The first novels that really made an impression on my teenage mind were Southern Gothic classics - Harper Lee's Mockingbird, Truman Capote's A Grass Harp, Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and as a result, it's a world that makes me nostalgic when I go back there to visit, like a sentimental tourist in my own childhood.

  What do so many of us weep for, anyway? Our own lost childhoods, I suppose. In my case, lost opportunities to be a better father, too, I’d guess. As always, the sense that time is slipping through our fingers and important things are being missed.

Sharp as ever - Linley Hamilton's 'In Transition' is out

For many years, as someone who worked in a music venue by day, and played gigs in the evenings, I have considered Linley Hamilton to be someone who played with the same impeccable taste - and with the same attention to detail - as he dressed.

  He always seemed to play with cool people, and he breezed in and out of venues looking sharp. There are few more instruments as cool as the trumpet to start with anyway, right? And a sharp dressed trumpet player is exponentially more sharp than any other sharp-dressed musician.

  And Linley seemed capable of playing ANYTHING. With ANYBODY. He has turned up in the most unlikely combinations - and always delivered something appropriate, unexpected and delightful.

  The first time I saw him play live was with the Dermot Harland Quintet at the Edgewater Hotel in Portstewart in the early 90s, and as the sun went down on the Atlantic beyond the windows, he played an exquisite solo on ‘When Sonny Gets Blue’, and I was hooked.

  He has progressed leaps and bounds even since then, and he remains an arresting talent – he has played beautiful trumpet solos for me on three of my albums, and on each occasion he has been exquisite. It’s a source of huge personal pride for me to share the stage with him occasionally as my guest, or when he augments the Ronnie Greer Blues Band line up.

  The reason for my gush is that Linley has released a delicious second album called ‘In Transition’. It's a beautiful thing, and features performances by Linley backed by a superb band - Johnny Taylor on piano, Damian Evans on bass, Dominic Mullan on drums and Julien Colarossi on guitar. Highlights include a beautiful arrangement of Rufus Wainwright's 'Dinner at 8' and Linley's own composition 'Dusk'. You can find links to the album here:

At Amazon, and at Spotify, and at Lyte records: http://lyterecords.com/

Haunts of ancient peace

Crawfordsburn Country Park, Bank Holiday Monday - picture by Andrea Montgomery

I have always enjoyed forest trails and walks. Some of my fondest childhood scenes are set in the woods.

On blazing summer days at St. Malachy’s Primary School in Coleraine, our headmaster Frank Molloy used to occasionally arrive unannounced in our classrooms and take a couple of dozen of us on a stroll around Mountsandel Forest. He would tell us the names of the trees, talk about the birds and wildlife that lived in the forest, and excite us with fanciful tales of highwaymen riding along the trails to escape capture. For a kid who had caught the bus in from the housing estate that morning, it was an unexpected trip to a leafy world filled with wild noises - with a beautiful high green canopy and a warm, soft floor.

My father and I, Roe Valley Forest Park in the mid-70s. The little pot belly, the steel-framed specs and the binoculars: Just a MAGNET for bullies.

My dad already knew the names of the trees – he had worked for a sawmill as a young man and knew his ash from his chestnut. When I was in my early teens, we got our first car – an Austin 1200, I seem to remember, in a nostalgic royal blue - and as a family we would often head out for Sunday drives to places like the Roe Valley Forest Park, where I would stare through binoculars, looking for anything other than sparrows and jackdaws.

Today Andrea and I went out for a walk around Crawfordsburn Country Park – and had a beautiful stroll along the stream there, with the banks just misted purple by bluebells. It’s a beautiful space – it was lovely to be in under that bright green roof, and then find ourselves skimming stones on the beach ten minutes later.

Both of us felt the oncoming rush of the spring – things starting to come up out of the ground and make themselves seen, the sky seeming to lift a little higher.

I’ve just had a month or two that have felt like a low-level hibernation of the spirit, so it’s good to feel the ground warming up again, the sense of promise renewed. Bring it on.

To begin at the beginning... A suggestion for the Perfect Library

The lovely people at Libraries NI have been running a campaign asking people to nominate their choice for a book to make up The Perfect Library, and they asked me a couple of weeks ago if I would make a selection.

  How do you narrow something like that down to one book? And how do you take into account the vagaries of mood – Monday’s choice would be Harper Lee, Tuesday’s might be Charles Bukowski... And the thing is, you KNOW someone else will have suggested Harper Lee already - she'll be in there within the first half a dozen selections, along with Catcher in the Rye and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and all the other regular residents of the Top Ten lists.

  Anyway, from the frame of mind I was in when I made the choice, here’s my entry for their campaign:

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

  'Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams...'

  I could have selected dozens of titles for this - ask me tomorrow and I'll probably have a different one in mind. However, right here, right now, my choice is Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. I first read it when I was at Coleraine Inst and it had a profound effect on me. At that time I didn't know you could DO that with words. It was ravishing and heartbreaking and dreamlike. If words were edible, this book would be a never-ending box of expensive chocolates. Of course, off I went and wrote all kinds of imitations of it - that's what dreamy 14-year-olds are supposed to do. It did show me what language was capable of - and there's a direct link from the joy of reading this to the joy of putting words together in the songwriting process. I still read Under Milk Wood every three or four years, and I often listen to the delicious BBC recording with Richard Burton as the narrator. I offer it as a choice for the Perfect Library in the hope that some other head-in-the-clouds 14-year-old will find it and be smitten.

 ( I think the Perfect Library entries are now closed, but if you'd like to suggest an entry, click HERE to be taken to the submission page. )

One for the departed

I wrote this poem in the car driving north one day last year after hearing that an old friend had died - I won't pretend I was deeply saddened, as we hadn't spoken for a long time - but I did mourn the connection we used to have. I don't know what I did - or when I did it - but I found myself suddenly locked out of the house that had been our friendship. I continued to throw a few flowers over that wall for a while, but the phone never rang again. so I let it be. I never showed the poem to anyone. There had been snow on the hills as I left the city that morning, and this is how the sky and the road to the north looked through my windscreen as I wrote it.

I drive north in the snow, and I think about you -

and a party you had at your house.

We drank to Lord of the Rings and John Millington Synge,

Flann O’Brien, Neil Young and Mickey Mouse.

Today the books on my shelf turns their spines to the wall;

all the characters’ hearts have been broken.

And thousand-year-old poems fold their frail, tired arms -

all the words, words, words have been spoken.

When we hugged in your hall we said we’d always be friends -

that’s hard work, but easy to say.

Because handshakes are brief and all parties end

when the taxis come and take us away.

Arrivals - something of a departure

Over the course of the last six days I’ve been given what I wished for – and it turned out to be (as you’d expect) not too pretty.

  Essentially I’ve been off work and holed up in my study, doing nothing but composing music, for the forthcoming drama ‘Arrivals’, which opens at the Crescent Arts Centre this week.

  The show, which explores interesting cross currents in the multi-cultural life of Northern Ireland, consists of five short pieces, written by a group of hugely talented writers from here and follows the fortunes of a cast of characters criss-crossing the globe to land here in search of love, marriage, refuge, work, inspiration - or just a new beginning.

  The plays, written by Shannon Yee, James Meredith, Paul McMahon, Deirdre Cartmill and John Morrison, were conceived and are directed by Andrea. For more information, visit the Terra Nova website at www.terranovaproductions.net.

  Most of the composition process has been huge fun, but some of it has of course been like having my teeth pulled, one molar each day. Walking in the door and seeing the guy there waiting, with the pliers.

  I had thought at the outset that nothing could be sweeter than having a concentrated amount of time to knuckle down and produce some music. But I had forgotten that when I normally make music, I follow a set of rules – there are lyrics, choruses, spaces for guitar solos. A structure that I can bend and twist any way I want.

  But this time I start with a number of canvases with outlines already sketched on them – it has to be something that suggests disquiet, says Andrea, or something that sounds restless and unresolved. With no lyrics to suggest disquiet or restlessness, I have to put my faith in the sound the instruments make.

  So the finished pieces are strange bedfellows – one of them sounds like a powerpop band in a small club. Another sounds like a Zen master playing the piano. Another sounds like Talking Heads. And one sounds like me smacking a variety of glass objects in my kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, and blowing into bottles.

  (This last one was interesting – to create the desired effect, I struck all kinds of glasses and jars alongside a drum loop. And then I blew across the top of a variety of bottles in the kitchen. When the process was over, I was left with a residue across my lower lip that was a mix of vodka, baileys, balsamic vinegar, sloe gin and fish sauce. Nice.) Of course, the pieces are all written to accompany scene change movement, so let’s hope they work.

  I should come clean and say this is not the first time I’ve written instrumental music. A couple of years ago I was commissioned to write pieces for an exhibition of paintings by Maurice Orr. I learned some valuable lessons during that process – every time I brought music to him he would ask for less. Take the harmonica out. Can we take out the percussion? Let’s lose the guitar.

  ‘Sorry... Er, lose the guitar?'

  A couple of the pieces ended up with just the sound of surf and a few broken piano chords here and there. But it worked. It was all about atmospheres.

  This is a similar process – one of the plays is about faiths meeting and clashing and meshing, so I played a piano piece that I hope sounds like two pianos speaking to each other.

  If you visit the ReverbNation player right HERE, you can download a couple of the tracks absolutely free.

  But if you’d like to see them in their proper context – in other words, setting up the atmosphere for the piece of drama to follow, come along to see the show at the following venues.

FEBRUARY 12-15 at 8pm nightly (and matinees Feb 13 at 1.30pm and Feb 15 at 2.30pm), BELFAST: Crescent Arts Centre

Call (028) 9024 2338 or visit www.crescentarts.org 

FEBRUARY 19 at 8pm, NEWTOWNARDS: Ards Arts Centre

Call (028) 9181 0803 or visit www.ards-council.gov.uk 

FEBRUARY 20 at 8pm, COLERAINE: Riverside Theatre

Call (028) 7012 3123 or visit www.riversidetheatre.org.uk 

FEBRUARY 21 at 8pm, ARMAGH: The Marketplace Theatre

Call (028 3752 1821 or visit www.marketplacearmagh.com 

FEBRUARY 22 at 8pm, DOWNPATRICK, Down Arts Centre

Call (028) 4461 0747 or visit www.downartscentre.com

What I want to be when I grow up

It's Careers Insight Day at the girls grammar school, so I have my little name badge and a table in the corner of the gymnasium. And all the teenagers who want to be rock & roll stars will flock to me, right? And gather around my feet to hear my words of wisdom?

Not quite...

As always with these things, for every bright spark, for very shining-eyed little Sylvia Plath angel with a notebook full of terrifying biro sketches and poems, there are thirteen other sleepy-eyed girls who look like they wish they were back in bed watching TV.

What is there to say to kids this age about careers, anyway? It's hard, hard work, girls. I want to make important pronouncements like: there are no easy ways to be rich and comfortable. The trick is not to make compromises with your life. Don't ever say, 'this will do'. But it's hard to make that point to 14-year-olds. They're being asked to make Big Grown Up Decisions about career choices – at 14, I didn’t even know what I wanted for breakfast.

By and large they regard me silently, like a small herd of beautiful, curious young deer that have sneaked in through a hole in the fence. When I finish talking and invite questions, their big eyes swim around the room and they look at the floor, or their nails, or the wooden climbing bars behind my head. And their cheeks redden ever so slightly in soundless embarrassment.

One of them bravely eases her hand up and reads one of the ‘suggested questions’ from the Careers Advice sheet in front of her.

'What would you consider to be the starting salary for a singer songwriter?'

And I think of Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan… and all of them making scratches on the paper, playing their first D Major chord - and having to start somewhere.

'The starting salary...' I say, 'is zero pounds a year.'

Me and Mr. Hemingway

I just finished reading Paul Hendrickson’s biography-that's-not-really-a-biography, Hemingway’s Boat.: Everything in Life He Loved and Lost. And like all good biographies (even those that back away slowly when referred to as biographies), it drove me back to the bookshelves, to read the work of the subject.

And the work is a patchy business, it has to be said, with prizes reserved for a few of the short stories, Fiesta, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms and A Moveable Feast.

Reading Hemingway has been like trying on old clothes from years ago you once thought looked really cool. An enjoyable experience but perhaps not considered fashionable anymore.

Hendrickson’s book hints at conflicted sexuality – not a new subject for Hemingway scholars. Its main point is that the writer’s relationship with his boat Pilar was the strong undercurrent below his best years. And the more landlocked and removed he got from his boat and the Caribbean, the more lost at sea he became.

By the time I was eleven and I got to the big library at Coleraine Inst, I gazed up at the tall shadowy shelves and was already aware that Hemingway was one of the big 20th Century names you were Supposed to Have Read. One of the authors known only by their surnames, like generals in some complicated war overseas – Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Forster.

When pocket money allowed, I had taken to stopping on my way home every now and then at Coleraine Book Shop in Stone Row, a neat oasis of orderly shelves of second hand stock (long since gone). And it was in there that I picked up a copy of Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (it still has the pencilled price in the back – 40p).

All the world’s a stage, and in my early teens I had sketched out a role for myself as someone with aspirations to be a writer, to be an unrequited lover, carrying my broken heart around the world with a tragic nobility that women would find irresistible.

In other words, I was a sitting duck for Fiesta by the time I read it – I was completely swept away by the doomed expatriate romance and the exotic Parisian and Spanish backdrops. I don’t think I ever quite got over it. That’s the mark of a really good book, I suppose. Some part of it enters you and takes up residence and never leaves.

Of course, the myth of Hemingway is irresistible, even as a source of ridicule. Hendrickson’s biography thankfully doesn’t buy any of the macho Hemingway industry bull. To me, though, it was more the image of the writer that I swallowed like a baited hook. The locomotive power of a man working, pressing the words into the page and getting his work done.

And this is what has drawn me back from the bookshelves to the desk with this little passage from the breathless and beautiful epilogue to Death in the Afternoon. I first read it years ago, and now that writing and creativity have become such a girder running through who I am, I re-read it and share it with a re-found sense of dedication and inspiration.

I dedicate it as a blessing to any of you reading this who are involved in your own creative journey. Take heart – and get your work done.

HEMINGWAY ‘The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.’

Down to the river

IT’S true – there are few things better designed to fray your nerves than opening the door on a wild night and finding a policeman standing there. A million thoughts crash through your head at once – but it’s okay: He’s here to remind us of the flood warning. Parts of Sydenham are at risk when the high tide meets high wind and heavy rain at midday tomorrow, he says. A perfect little storm that could see us evacuated if things get really bad.

Evacuated? Let’s be honest - that’s not a word that comes up often in conversation.

I spend the rest of the evening trying to decide whether to actually be worried or not. I reason – probably correctly – that our house is pretty elevated (the street rises quite a bit from the far end to us), and that we have two additional steps up to the front door.

I stomp around the house all evening, looking out the windows and telling myself this is the kind of thing that happens to other people. And yet every now and then I think about throwing some underwear and pyjamas into a rucksack, and moving some precious stuff up a floor. I keep checking Twitter and making sure all my hand-held devices are fully charged - and making sure I have a good book handy, in case I have to spend a night sleeping in a primary school assembly hall or something.

The next morning is windy but dry, and there’s a definite edge to the morning – people are out in their front gardens talking to each other. As midday approaches, emergency vehicles go down Park Avenue in the direction of the Connswater River. I quietly take the car and park it a couple of streets away, on higher ground. Not everyone is willing to take it so seriously. A neighbour texts me to say he's coming home at lunchtime, 'to put down a couple of sheets of kitchen roll just in case'.

Andrea and I decide to take a look, and we’re surprised to find as we arrive at the river that about two hundred people have decided to do the same. There’s a kind of carnival atmosphere down there, as people stand and watch the Connswater – swollen dangerously high and looking kind of cold and evil, tickling the underside of the motorway bridge.

Local politicians are here looking concerned. The police and emergency services are keeping an eye on things and people are taking photographs of each other. It’s like a rock festival. I almost expect someone to start selling hot dogs. All around us are streets and streets of houses with sandbags piled up at the door – their gardens are a good six feet below the level of the sandbags, and if the water level rises another foot, the river will come down the embankment in seconds and head straight for their front doors.

As 12.15 passes, Andrea and I seem to have an impression that the water level is dropping, almost perceptibly as we watch it. In any event, we decide to call it a day and go back home. On the way, we are passed by people going in the opposite direction – mums and dads bringing their kids down to see the flood. It’s remarkable in a way, this appetite for any kind of experience - people rushing to see a disaster even as it potentially heads towards them. There are families walking down Park Avenue with drinks and sweets. The police turn away a couple of massive all-terrain vehicles, with mums and dads and the kids in the back, hoping they could drive down to Victoria Park and maybe watch the sandbags as they give way. It’s like we’ve seen a million apocalypse movies and we want to have our own close shave with a disaster, even a little one.

(When I get back to the house, I find the rucksack that I had thrown on the bed but didn’t get round to packing, and it makes me feel a little foolish. I throw it back on top of the wardrobe, before anybody notices)