Apples and Oranges

One of the downsides, and there are many, of spending three months indoors writing books all day and drinking beer all evening, is that when you finally emerge into the public domain (unlike your book, which will probably spend months in some dusty office being manhandled by a bespectacled chap who likes to use the …

FML17: A person in all but name

I need to know the identity of FML17. Not for any particular reason. He’s nothing to me. Not now anyway. He’s dead. Died on Friday, after falling from his bunk bed. Who does that? Falls from a bunk bed and dies? My daughter fell from a bunk bed once. We were watching a movie in …

Crave: Where everybody knows your name

I was conducting an interview recently with a couple of guys I think the world of. But it wasn't going so well. In fact, it was going horribly. Ten minutes into the conversation, they started to argue. Not with me but with each other. I realised later, listening back to the tape, that I had …

I Am Easy To Find: A soundtrack to my latest long night

It's been difficult to know all week whether I've been depressed or just perpetually hungover. Which seems like the perfect emotional backdrop for a new album release from The National. The National are my ultimate "do I accidentally take too many pills/just listen to some music" kind of band. My darkest times of the past …

When God took Job’s teeth: Tommy Tiernan tells a Bible story

No one — NO ONE — tells Bible stories like Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan. That he tells Bible stories at all says something. Something about his Catholic upbringing, perhaps, and definitely something about where his faith is now. As he said in a recent interview on Irish television, ‘It feels to me that we're born with an …

Stuff me: Mind your language

I have been swearing a bit lately, particularly in my written work. I suppose I should stop. There was a time when I wouldn't have uttered anything like a swear word — in fact, when I emigrated to Australia at the age of 15, the Aussie schoolboys (who used the word ‘fark’ even when asking the …

My blue jacket: A fashion disaster story

The day I flew in to LAX from Nashville was memorable for two reasons. The first reason was that sitting behind me up at the front of the Southwestern Airlines plane was Keith Urban. I had watched him throughout the entire flight. When I say watched, I mean filmed. I had filmed him, surreptitiously, throughout …

Coffee and cigarettes: A captured moment

A kiss, but not a kiss A moment of connection, and also contempt. Those eyes, dark and foreboding, laughing with, or at, me. The casual and forceful exhalation of cigarette smoke in my direction ... towards the lens, towards my eyes, one of them closed but stung nevertheless. The ultimate act of dismissal. Or seduction. …

Who you calling fat?: a memoir

I received a text today that read, simply: We are starting a fatty challenge. I reckon you can take it! I take umbrage at this. One, the assumption that because I look fat, I am fat. And two, the equally presumptuous assumption that I could win easily. It's like the opposite of ‘You have nothing …