All you have to do is ask , leave your queries
All you have to do is ask , leave your queries
Dark Days & Light Days
& Everything In Between
A Memoir
Prologue
I always imagined, if I ever sat down to write something like this, that it would have a Hunter S. Thompson feel to it. Nicotine and other substances. A gonzo journalist picking through the wreckage of a life lived at full tilt, cigarette in one hand, something stronger in the other, the prose arriving in great feverish bursts.
As it happens, life rarely imitates art.
I am fifty-three years old. I am giving up smoking at the end of this
Dark Days & Light Days
& Everything In Between
A Memoir
Prologue
I always imagined, if I ever sat down to write something like this, that it would have a Hunter S. Thompson feel to it. Nicotine and other substances. A gonzo journalist picking through the wreckage of a life lived at full tilt, cigarette in one hand, something stronger in the other, the prose arriving in great feverish bursts.
As it happens, life rarely imitates art.
I am fifty-three years old. I am giving up smoking at the end of this month — a pastime I have been faithfully engaged with since the age of seventeen. Thirty-six years. That’s not a habit; that’s a career. And so I find myself with twenty-four days left, dragging on a cigarette while I try to excavate whatever memories still remain accessible to me — which, if I’m being honest, is not nearly as many as I’d like. Large portions of my memory banks appear to have been permanently mislaid. Whether that’s the smoking, the years, or simply the way the mind protects itself from the full weight of everything it has witnessed, I genuinely couldn’t tell you.
But here we are. The clock is ticking. The ashtray is full. And apparently, this is a memoir now.
The fat lady sings in twenty-four days.
It is six-thirty in the morning. The world is in a particular kind of mess right now — the sort that feels new but isn’t. As I sit here, I’m listening to The The, Infected, and it strikes me that when Matt Johnson wrote that record he was raging at roughly the same kind of mess, over forty years ago. Not a lot has changed out there. What has changed — what changes constantly, unreliably, and without permission — is memory. And perspective. But that much, at least, is mine.
What follows is not a chronology. It is a collection — of experiences, of events, of moments that have somehow survived the cull. They arrive in no particular order, because that is how memory works, or at least how mine does. This is my truth. My recollection. There is no right or wrong version here, only what I can remember, and I can’t swear that all of it is accurate. But it is accurate to me, and for the purposes of this exercise, that will have to be enough.
So. The sixth of April. Fifty-three years to account for. Not all of it was fun. I have made mistakes — plenty of them — but every decision, every wrong turn, every moment of poor judgement has been a step on the path to here, and it is difficult to argue too strenuously with here. So I won’t.
When I try to reach back into early life, the memories thin out quickly. Much of what I can retrieve from those years is dark in places — not an ideal opening to any story — so I won’t begin there. I’ll go forwards and back as things come to me, following the current rather than fighting it.
Music has been the constant. It has played a larger part in my life than I could easily explain — a lot of artists have been my only company in the dark hours. I am not a natural sharer. Most of my thinking, most of my rationalising, has happened inside my own head, in private, often with something loud or something beautiful playing in the background. The The understood something about that. Sweet Bird of Truth is as apt today as the day it was written.
*(Flight leader, this is “Combat” — your forward controller. I have three targets for you. Your first is a blockhouse — Target 11, north-east corner of the combat zone. Request Napalm.)*
*(Roger, Flight Leader. The identity of your request is… a batch of Napalm. On the blockhouse in the north-east corner of the target area. Flight leader, understand. Thirty seconds.)*
*(White flag, this is “Combat” — we have you in sight. Roll on to the west, call to confirm you have the target area inside.)*
Arabia, Arabia, Arabia, Arabia…
Six o’clock in the morning and I’m the last person on this plane still awake. You know, I can almost smell the blood washing against the shores of this land that can’t forget its past. Oh, the wind that carries this plane is the wind of change — Heaven sent and Hell bent — over the mountain tops we go, just like all the other GI Joes. E-I-E-I adios.
This is your captain calling — with an urgent warning. We’re above the Gulf of Arabia, our altitude is falling, and I can’t hold her up. There’s no time for thinking. All hands on deck. This bird is sinking.
Across the beaches and cranes, rivers and trains, all the money I’ve made, bodies I’ve maimed. Time was when I seemed to know, just like any other GI Joes. Should I cry like a baby or die like a man, while all the planet’s little wars start joining hands? Oh, Heaven or Hell — you know there’s nothing to be done in this whole wide world. Arabia. I don’t know what’s wrong or right. I’m just a regular guy with bottled up insides. I ain’t ever been to church or believed in Jesus Christ, but I’m praying God’s with you when you die.
This is your captain calling — with an urgent warning. We’re above the Gulf of Arabia, our altitude is falling, and I can’t hold her up. There’s no time for thinking. All hands on deck. This bird is sinking.
Arabia, Arabia, Arabia, Arabia…
I’m not here to fill pages with other people’s words. But sometimes you have to sit with every line of a song before something in it finally gets through. I haven’t always been good at that — taking time to consider consequences, sitting with things before acting on them. For large parts of my life I have operated on emotion. Raw, unfiltered, immediate emotion — positive and negative in equal measure, and rarely anything in between.
I spend a great deal of time inside my own head. I have never been a natural sharer of feelings. Matt Johnson put it better than I could: I’m just a regular guy with bottled up insides. That line has followed me around for forty years, and it shows no sign of leaving.
But I’ll come back to The The.
France
It’s January, and I’m on a ferry somewhere between Rosslare and Le Havre. The cold is real — a North Atlantic January cold — but it’s something else too. It’s the cold of being completely, suddenly alone. I’m not sure when that realisation landed, but when it did, it hit hard. ‘How the hell do parents let their kids just get on a train to anywhere?’ Mine did. And here I am.
I can’t remember much of the first part of the crossing. There’s going to be a lot of that in this story — great blank stretches where memory refuses to cooperate — but what I do remember is that somewhere in those twelve hours at sea, I found people. Or they found me. Four of us, drawn together the way strangers are when they’re all quietly terrified of the same thing.
There was Allen — bespectacled, shy, but sharp. There was a girl I’ll call Rachel, confident in a way the rest of us weren’t, and with the languages to back it up, which would matter later. And there was Brett — a tough Dubliner, older than the rest of us, probably in his twenties — the kind of person you immediately feel safer standing next to. I can picture all three of them clearly. I cannot, for the life of me, remember all their actual names, which tells you something about memory, or maybe about youth.
By the time we docked in Le Havre the following morning, we were something. Not quite friends — codependents is probably closer to the truth — but the fear that had stalked me through the night had been replaced, almost entirely, by excitement about what came next. We boarded a train to Paris. Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, but four, and considerably less wholesome.
Disney was recruiting in the thousands that year and had the infrastructure to match — cheap hotels covered upfront and quietly garnished from your wages later. We ended up in a chain called Hotel Campanile. Not fancy. Not memorable. But it was a base, and a base was everything.
The company had an interesting theory about the Irish and the English. This was 1992 — the Troubles were in full flow, bombs were going off with grim regularity, and Disney, being an American organisation, had concluded that proximity between the two groups would end badly. Their solution was to house us on opposite sides of Paris, as if the Seine itself might serve as a peace line.
What they hadn’t fully thought through was that we were all going to be working together regardless.
I grew up in Dublin, not the North. My relationship with the Troubles was largely abstract — the national anthem sung with feeling at the end of a night, the romantic idea of thirty-two counties, the words ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’ shouted into the middle distance. I had no lived experience of what it meant to actually grow up in those six counties, and my feelings about the English extended no further than a few pointed songs and some spirited rugby watching.
The reality, once we were all thrown together, was that we got on fine. More than fine. There was a shared language, a shared humour, and it turned out we weren’t all that different from each other.
There was one exception. One night — a party in a flat we’d rented — the French Gendarmerie arrived and broke things up. Their response was instinctive and oddly revealing: they immediately separated us into two rooms. The Irish and the French in one. The English in the other. They gave the English a hard time, scared them a little, and left the rest of us largely alone. It was a strange reminder that the politics we’d mostly set aside still existed somewhere in the world beyond our little group.
But for the most part, we were just young, and abroad, and figuring it out together.
The Disney interview was a full day in a hotel somewhere in Dublin city centre. I can’t remember which one — only that it was late 1991, it was freezing, and there were hundreds of people queuing around the block to get in. I stood in that queue for what felt like hours before the doors even opened.
The process began in groups of thirty or so, packed into conference rooms working through group exercises — the kind designed, presumably, to flush out anyone too shy or too difficult to manage. Round by round, the numbers thinned. By the time the day reached its final stage, eight or nine hours after it had started, those of us still standing were taken through individual interviews. In French.
I should clarify what I mean by French. I had Leaving Cert French. Which is to say I knew some words. Could conjugate a verb in a controlled environment. Had at some point memorised a passage about a family called Dupont going to the market on a Tuesday. Conversational French, as I discovered that afternoon, bears roughly the same relationship to school French as the Artemis 2 spacecraft currently does to Earth. Technically connected. Practically, an enormous distance apart.
What I remember most, though, is this: the French interviewers were kind about it. They seemed to appreciate the effort, even when what I was producing was closer to enthusiastic gibberish than actual language. That has stayed with me. There is something in the attempt that people respond to, regardless of the result.
Looking back, Disney was recruiting thousands upon thousands of people across Europe. The churn in those early weeks must have been staggering — thirty, forty percent of new starters gone within days, overwhelmed or underprepared or simply not what had been advertised on the tin. They hired more or less everything with a heartbeat and a passport. And yet — and this is the strange thing — when the process ended and you were told you were in, you felt like you had genuinely achieved something. Like you had been chosen. Like it meant something.
Maybe it did. I was grateful then. I’m still grateful now.
Sign up to hear from us about specials, sales, and events.
.
Words & thoughts