1. My first ever day's pay was four shillings and sixpence (22.5p) for picking peas. I was ten or eleven years old and my brother and I travelled on the back of a flat-bed truck out to the Lincolnshire countryside. We were paid one shilling and sixpence for each sack we harvested and I managed three sacks. I felt like a millionaire.
  2. My wife married a Countryside Warden. Like most writers, I've worked a wide variety of alternative jobs. When it came to entering my occupation on our marriage certificate, I stupidly entered the last temporary job I'd had instead of 'author'. Other miscellaneous jobs I might have chosen from my CV: painter and decorator, barman, car park attendant, bookseller, bank cashier, library assistant, picking peas . . .
  3. Watching movies made me want to be a writer. You'd think it would have made me want to make movies but, each time I left the cinema, I thought that's how I want to make people feel with my writing. When I saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a woman fainted in the cinema and had to be carried out she was so overcome with emotion. The Deer Hunter was first shown with an intermission after the wedding and the first Vietnam fire fight; I stumbled out to the foyer, shocked and amazed at what the cinema could do. The editor of my first novel, An Accident Waiting to Happen, had me change the ending because it was too like the end of a movie - this is a book, she (quite rightly) told me.
  4. A great uncle of mine was one of the finest footballers ever to play for England. Wilf Mannion, the son of Irish immigrants and one of 10 children, was an inside forward for Middlesboro and was capped for England on 26 occasions between 1946 and 1951. His career was badly affected both by the Second World War and by his refusal to play under the existing slave-like contracts footballers endured at the time. I'm very proud of the stand he took to improve the conditions of players and - of course - how highly regarded he was as a player.
  5. I rode the Hulk Roller Coaster at Universal Island Of Adventure, Orlando. Check it out here. Am I bad-ass or what?
  6. My grandfather, Bernard Lynskey, was born in the year 1900 and worked in the steel industry his whole life. As a committed union man, he saw his working day reduced from 12 to 8 hours as the years went by. He died in 1979, soon after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, and I'm happy he didn't live to see the destruction she wrought on the rights he'd fought so hard to gain.
  7. I live in Galway on the west coast of Ireland. Our house looks out across Galway Bay to the Burren mountains - on a clear day, that is. Some days you can't even see the end of the road. Having migrated steadily west my whole life, I thoroughly expected New York to be the next place I lived, followed by San Francisco or perhaps Vancouver; but we kind of got stuck on this side of the Atlantic.
  8. In October 1979, I saw Ian Curtis play live with Joy Division. In May 1977, I saw Talking Heads play support to The Ramones at Leeds Polytechnic. In 1978 I went to see Bob Dylan, reckoning it was my one and only opportunity ever to see Bob play live; he's been touring non-stop ever since. In December 1975, I saw The Who play in the Hammersmith Odeon. In October 1977, I saw The Stranglers in Leeds; they opened with No More Heroes and the place went ballistic. I was so happy I kissed a complete stranger in the mosh pit. I saw The Jam, The Clash, Elvis Costello, The Buzzcocks and The Pogues, amongst others. In June 1973, I wasn't allowed to go see David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust at Leeds Rollarena because my parents said I was too young. Also in 1973, I wasn't allowed to go see Roxy Music in York - Eno's last gig - because I had school the next day. And, perhaps my biggest musical regret, I also missed out on the chance to see The Sex Pistols in Leeds in December 1976 - also a school night.
  9. I left home when I was seventeen to hitch-hike to London. A deadly combination of watching The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road convinced me a life less ordinary lay in wait for me in London. You might say I was something of an impressionable teenager. When my elder brother saw I was serious, he came along for the ride. After failing to catch a lift, we gave up and caught the bus back into town, drinking ourselves silly for the rest of the day.
  10. I first saw the movie Rebel without a Cause on the big screen. I was eighteen at the time and it was part of a double bill with Terrence Malick's Badlands. Again - talk about impressionable! I bought a red bomber jacket and wore it with blue jeans and a white T-shirt because I too wanted to be 'just like James Dean'. I also saw Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire on the same big screen at the same age - Stellllllaaaaaaa!!!!