Spring is best time to write something new!

As spring spreads across the land, offering a revitalising massage for our weather-beaten souls, the rebirth of natural life inspires us to think of beginnings.

I’m so lucky to love my work, and there’s little more exciting for any writer than starting a new book. I’ve just begun one with the working title of Arrivals.

For a couple of decades I moved around the globe, hitch-hiking well in excess of 100,000 miles, searching for something nebulous and elusive.

As you’d expect, on the way I enjoyed a myriad of incredible adventures, and as the stories in my new book will attest, arrivals are often the most dramatic parts of a voyage. Around midnight on November 22, 1984, I walked off a bus at New York City’s Port Authority, pumping with adrenaline at the realisation that I was stepping onto a new continent for the first time.

My head was filled with romantic notions born out of Woody Guthrie’s masterpiece Bound for Glory, while my freshly-purchased Blue Bag was making its debut appearance on my shoulder, as overstuffed with unnecessary clobber as I was with excitement.

I didn’t care that I had nowhere to sleep. Having grown up in London, where the prostitutes of Soho shot coy glances from dusky shadows, I thought I was city smart, but Manhattan was a revelation.

As I wandered onto the street a tall woman walked straight over to me, her hand grasping and then slowly massaging my boy bits.

“Are you gay?” she asked.

“No, but I am broke!” I replied, striding away, humming that line from Simon and Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound about “... come-ons from the whores on 7th Avenue...” which I customised to say “...I did not take some comfort there...”

A few hours later I’d somehow managed to blag my way into a free night in a luxurious hotel suite just off Broadway. I bounced up and down on that plush bed, the thrill of victory pulsing through me on that first night of my first round-the-world trip.

Several months and two continents later I walked into a huge Holden car dealership on the outskirts of Melbourne, and asked for a job. The bossman asked if I was the usual Pommie bludger who’d sit around on my arse doing nothing all day. I replied that if I was the usual Pommie bludger I wouldn’t have walked into his garage asking for a job.

“You start Monday!” he replied, but I had to wait another two weeks until I really arrived, after I’d been challenged to a beer drinking competition by my workmates and left their local champion dribbling on the pub carpet.

One of my favourite arrivals was the moment I stepped into the Caribbean off the coast of the Bahamas, realising in a single second that I’d been lied to throughout my entire childhood.

To read the full article, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.