This is the sea

This piece originally appeared in the Irish Daily Mail magazine last September. I thought it might be worth sharing here for anyone who hasn’t already seen it....

Growing up next to the sea, you take it for granted. That’s not to say you don’t notice its beauty, just that it is always there, like, say, electricity. Where I went to school the sea was a constant presence, a shimmer behind the railings, rockpools where pictures in our science books came alive. You could say that the sea was part of the curriculum.

During the summer, my friends and I headed over Killiney Hill and down the steps at the back to Whiterock. When we had money we went to the Rainbow Rapids in Dun Laoghaire, snaking plastic tubes that swerved out of the old baths building and back in to a deep plunge pool inside. The green slide was the fastest, with more twists. I always went for the beige one.

You see the truth was, even though I was surrounded by sea, I was no water baby. Far from it, but then I was not from a family of water babies. My mother never learned to swim and my father is the only person I’ve ever met who taught himself, lying across a dining room chair, a library book open on the floor beneath him as he practised strokes in mid air. And yes, it was Dad who taught me.

I only remember snatches of those lessons: a mouthful of water, the opposite side of the pool seeming to bob ever further away. My arms cold and bare after the water wings had gone. Somehow, I got the idea that if I put my face fully underwater, I would certainly drown. Despite all this, the lessons were a success, certainly more so than our driving lessons years later, in that I did actually learn to swim. I swam with my neck arched and my chin well above the surface, I swam with graceless strokes fuelled by panic. But I swam all the same.

When we were teenagers, my friends grew more adventurous. They leapt off rocks and piers and boats. My fear grew in direct proportion to their confidence and I stayed near the edge, never higher than my waist, well out of danger of a wave breaking in my face. It bothered me for a while but then it didn’t, because we grew up and there were much more important things to do. For a few years I lived in London and the closest I ever got to the sea was the canal, where the listless water barely covered the wheels of the submerged shopping trolleys. And it was only when I moved home, back to the sea, that I started to notice it in a way I never had before; the colours and shape of the waves, how being next to it seemed to fill me up, like water seeping into a footprint on the shore.

That’s what brought me to the side of that pool one Monday night in January, convincing myself, but still not convinced that I could do this. There was an audition swim before we were assigned classes and one splashy breathless width later I was joining the level twos, a group I barely had a chance to assess before our teenage instructor set us off on our first width.

It started badly. My new fog resistant goggles were steaming up already and in my haste I hadn’t fitted them properly so the rubber strap bisected my ear. Halfway across, I became conscious of a voice calling out, repeating the same thing. “Put your head down! Put your face in the water!” I realised it was my instructor and that she was talking to me.

Of course, I was doing my usual stroke, neck and chin achingly high and I ignored her. I wanted to explain to her that I wasn’t ready, that it would take a while, but she kept calling, louder each time and just like that, my body obeyed her, even though my mind hadn’t. My face was in the water and I could see tiles and the shimmery white leg of someone in front of me. I pulled my head back out, gasped in some air before going under again and again until suddenly I was there, at the other side.

Clinging onto the rail, my heart pounded. I grinned from ear to ear. The instructor was focussed on someone else now, making wild gestures with her arms at one of the men. Whether it was what he was doing or should be doing, I couldn’t tell. She hadn’t noticed my achievement, no-one had. There would be no pat on the back, no brass band parading along the tiles. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that when it was my turn to swim back, my heart pounded a little slower than before. And each time that night and the next Monday and the one after that, the fear loosened its grip, bit by bit, so I was able to leave it behind like the trail of bubbles in my wake.

I’m still no water baby. You wouldn’t envy my technique. But I swim in the sea and I love it. I run straight in. When the waves come, I close my eyes and dive right through them and when I break the surface again the icy tingle on my skin feels something close to freedom.

Things I never blogged about in March

Today is the second of April. And too late I realise that it’s five whole weeks since I’ve been writing ‘update blog’ on my to do list, five whole weeks since I’ve been moving it onto the next day.

It’s not that March was a barren blogging month. Far from it, there were lots of blog worthy events; the first ‘hello’ in Terminal Two, my new Villagers CD, a ceili in Monkstown that provided more than enough material. I could’ve blogged about the hen party of one of my oldest friends or a turquoise frying pan or the two robins by my foot in Blackrock Park or pruning the garden after a long winter or about how it’s easier to look at a closed down shopfront when the sun is shining.

I almost blogged about childhood memories of St Patrick’s Day – fractured views of the parade through gaps between the people in front of me, the boom of ‘ATA Security’, a shamrock shake afterwards.

I wish I’d blogged about a nighttime drive across the Wicklow mountains, looking back over my shoulder to see the orange flames rising from the landscape, sudden and frightening against the black, black sky.

I should’ve blogged about the Dublin Book Festival and the novel writing course I’m doing with the Irish Times and the new French edition of The Other Boy.

You’ll be glad I didn’t have the energy to blog about a sudden bout of gastroenteritis.

Truth is, it wasn’t lack of material or even that I was too busy to blog in March – no more so than usual. What happened in March was that I was on a break from my second novel. I took the break seriously, those precious few weeks to draw breath and not work and where any writing done is sporadic, half written scribbled things, notes in journals and sometimes just inside your own head and sometimes not even that.

But now it’s April and it’s back to it, the next draft. And something tells me there’ll be lots of new things to blog about.

Or not.

Dublin Book Festival

The Dublin Book Festival is bigger than ever this year, running from Thursday 2nd March until Sunday 6th.

There are three things I really like about this year’s programme.

The first is that there is, quite literally, something for everyone. Whether your thing is prose or poetry, crime or literary fiction, history or comedy, the programme is jam packed with household names. They have events for kids and young adults, walking tours and tea parties and even a session with everyone’s favourite Dragon, Bobby Kerr for those who are more interested in ‘books’ of a different type.

The second thing, is that almost all of these events are free. For the ones that do carry a cost, that cost is a very reasonable €5 which you get back by way of a book token for the festival book shop. The cost of readings and workshops in this country has long been a pet peeve of mine and it’s great to see a festival that’s so accessible to everyone on all levels.

And the third? The third is that I’m delighted to say I’m part of the programme this year and will be lining out with other ‘Fresh Voices’ Paul Soye, Nuala Ní Chonchúir and Liam Carson at 4pm on Sunday 6th March in City Hall. There’ll be readings and discussion with our chair Sinead MacAodha, so should be a lot of fun. Hope to see some of you there!

http://www.dublinbookfestival.com/

Moments

Before I was published, I’d often imagine into the future; what it would be like to get a book deal, to see my name on the cover of a novel, to see that novel on a bookshop shelf. These daydreams would usually come when I was at some difficult stage of the process, times when I was trying to avoid actually doing any writing at all.

Since I’ve been published, I’ve noticed that people often ask me about those exact moments I used to imagine. Usually, they have a smile on their face, urging me to tell them stories of elation, euphoria, of a world shattering into a billion starry molecules all around me. And sometimes I tell them that, or something like it, even though it’s not one hundred percent true.

The truth is, that while I remember each of these moments with a startling clarity - the Wednesday August evening when I got the e-mail, the Saturday morning I met my editor outside a McDonalds to take possession of my first copies - as well as elation, there was relief and disbelief and fear. And even as each event was happening, there was something else going on too, a tiny gap between the way I was actually feeling and how I was expected to feel. A gap big enough for the dreaded ‘should’ to squeeze through, as in: should I be feeling more than this?

Today, I received delivery of the paperback format of that same novel, The Other Boy. The paperback release is a low key affair, a new cover, bigger print run – no publicity or launch parties here. I was on the phone, still in my running clothes, when the courier rang the doorbell and I ate my breakfast, answered some e-mails and played a Facebook scrabble move before I rescued the box from the hall and sliced through the brown tape.

The first thing I noticed about the book was how nicely it fit into my hand; chunky but not too big, the cover matt and soft and grass green. When I turned it over, my name was there, right at the top. I sat down on the couch, read a bit in the middle and I remembered writing it. I flicked to another section and smiled, I remembered writing that too. And that was when it finally hit me, 10 months after being published, a year and a half after getting the deal, that this was actually my book, a book I’d written. The kind of book I might even buy.

I’m writing this in Starbucks. There’s a floor length window with the sea outside and today it’s rough, white peaks of waves on grey water. I like writing here because it’s a nice distraction to glance out at it, between paragraphs, when I run out of words. Today, I’m glancing at something else as well, my novel, the paperback, on the table, next to my cup.

It’s silly, I know, self indulgent, to carry it around like this and tomorrow it’ll be back on the shelf where it belongs. But just for today, I’ll keep it close and enjoy the unexpected tingle of elation that seeing it unexpectedly seems to bring.

Seapoint Literary Supper

This is a bit of a shameless plug but I think it's an event some of you might be interested in. Dubray Bookshops and Seapoint restaurant in Monkstown - home of amazing seafood and their legendary rosemary and parmesan fries - have started a literary supper evening on the first Thursday of every month.

The idea is simple. For €28 you get to enjoy a 3 course meal, a glass of wine and a reading and Q&A session with an Irish author, who, on Thursday 3rd February, happens to be yours truly.

Spaces are limited (genuinely so, as you can see in the photo the room is lovely but not very big) so if you're interested call Seapoint on 663 8480 to book your place.

Kick off on the night is 7:30 and as well as reading from The Other Boy (which is out in paperback that day) I'll also be doing my first reading from my new novel What Might Have Been Me.

Hope to see you there!

Saying goodbye

I went to a funeral last Thursday, a funeral of someone I’d never met, someone I didn’t know. Only now, sitting down to write about it, I feel like I knew her very well.

She was the mother of a friend of mine. The kind of friend who you can have a great laugh with and a great conversation with, a friend I don’t see every week, or even every month, but whenever I spend time with him, I vow to see him more often.

We met a few years ago, when I was going through a tough time in my life, a time, it would turn out, that would mark the start of a period of great change for me. We shared a small office and the same sense of humour and a liking for chocolate muffins. But mostly what we shared was a passion for music. There wasn’t much in the office but there was an old CD player - 1990s ghetto blaster style - and we took to taking turns hijacking it every day, sharing our soundtracks with each other. And somewhere between Pink Floyd and Arcade Fire, we became friends.

Today, I heard his mother’s soundtrack; Mama Cass and Mozart and of course Bob Dylan. She was a young woman and her illness had been brief, barely eight short weeks between the day she saw the first signs of it and the day at St Jerome where we all stood shoulder to shoulder waving her goodbye. But she was an organised woman, with a plan in an envelope of what she wanted. And it was this plan that her two boys – two men – bravely brought to life with no celebrant, no middle man, only this rich tapestry of words and music. Without the framework of the familiar, the rhythm of rituals, there was a purity, a simplicity to it all. The sound of a life well lived, of a soul, singing goodbye.

And as I stood there, listening to her voice rise and fall in the chapel, the clear pitch of each note as she sang “The Moon and St Christopher”, I felt as if I had known her, this woman who touched so many. And I wished I had. And it made me want to work harder – so much harder – at really getting to know the people around me, and most of all, to really get to know myself.

Getting re-started

What is it about re-starting something, that makes it so hard?

I think the answer is somewhere in that little ‘re.’ Re-starting is just like starting, but without that energy and excitement you had the first time around. There’s usually a reason that you’ve stopped doing whatever you were doing and you know the effort that’ll be involved to get going again. You know the pitfalls along the way, because you’ve fallen in and peeped out from inside.

This week for me – like a lot of you, I suspect – has been a week of re-starts. Starting back at work, yoga, running, blogging, even though these are all things I enjoy, they’ve been surprisingly hard to get back into after only a couple of week’s break. And so, I decided, to get the re-starting started, I’d go easy on myself this week, instead of raising that bar, or even keeping it level, for once I’d bring it down a little notch.

And, at the end of the first week of 2011, I’m happy to say, my underachieving approach has worked pretty well. You could even say, it’s beaten my expectations.

My first run wasn’t quite as early as usual, or as long. A simple twenty minutes, rather than thirty was the carrot to get me out there and, encouraged by the fact that I could walk pain free the next day, I got the second run of 2011 in as well. Rather than go for the advanced yoga class I opted for an easier one – no inversions here! – and lying on my mat at the end of an hour and a quarter, my out-of-practice body felt the ache of effort and accomplishment that I normally feel after an intense two day workshop. Good thing I’ve saved that particular treat for next weekend then...

And, as for the blog, my deal to myself was this: I just had to blog by the end of this week. It didn’t have to be the best blog post ever, the funniest or the most entertaining or insightful. It just had to be readable and a bit interesting. A low-ish bar that I hope I’ve met, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.

I promise to raise it for the next one!