Wisconsin loves cheese.  It’s the consummate culinary con-man.  It weasels its way on to almost every item in the menu.  Coffee and tea seem to have escaped for the moment, but probably not for long.  There must be a market for ‘Mocha Parmesan’ or ‘Cappuccino Cheddar’ or ‘Earl Grey Brie Brew’ – in fact I thought I could hear a mafia type Johnny no-neck asking for a ‘gouda espresso’ but it may just have been his accent.

From the concert hall window in Milwaukee one could rave with the disorientation of watching islands of ice gliding down the river outside and later gliding back upstream again ten minutes later as Lake Michigan yelled “go to hell and warm up – you’re not coming out here!”  Indeed Milwaukee may have suited Elizabeth the First for it laid down a perfectly virginal blanket of snow in time for our first concert.  By the following morning, however, the doggy wind had shredded, worried, and ripped it into dirty wooly clumpy mounds.  Maybe Eliza, who was chilly enough as it was, would have enjoyed the milder weather of Newport News, Virginia.  Her ladies-in-waiting would have to keep a firm grip on her skirts here too for another mongrel wind, even if it had a warmer breath, was whipping and stripping the last of the ragged crimson yellow faded green leaves from the ‘boogy-boogy’ branches.  Like failed politicians, they’ll hang around on the ground for a while until they can find their way back into the system.  There is no death, just a re-arrangement of our ingredients.

A bevy of antirrhinums in full bloom – right there on the side of the street; now that’s the beauty of Texas in the month of December.  Forget about the long-legged Texan gals in the tight jeans and feast your eyes on the undergrowth.  Snapdragons we called them as kids (the flowers I mean, not the gals), but you had to be careful when opening the mouth of the dragon in case there might be a bee in there filling his pouch.  Long-legged or short-legged they can all sting.  I know that the natives take this pleasant weather for granted but, for the visitor from cooler climes, it is a welcome surprise and, for me at least, a comforting feature of recent Christmas concert tours.  Last year, at this time, I remember trekking up to the old Spanish mission which stands on the hill above Santa Barbara in California and, on the way, walking through a park full of flowering shrubs in all their glory.  It gave me that eerie feeling of having found paradise.  When a passing bird just missed me with his splatter I quickly realized that I was still on earth.

Just now I hear the train whistle blow as it passes through Houston, Texas.  What a truly American sound that is – a lonesome minor chord, dissonant, ghostly.  I love it and long to hear it every time I come to the United States.  I remember a night in the aptly named town of Erie, Pennsylvania.  The whistle blew long and lonesome away in the distance, followed closely by the baying of a dog, a searing flash of lightning but no thunder, the angry ‘weeow’ of a cat screeching under my window, and what sounded like somebody falling out of bed in the room above my head.  Maybe they were pushed, who knows?

There can be no doubt, however, but that the train whistle started the whole drama off in the first place.  Maybe ‘Beetlejuice’ was driving that night.  I most often hear the whistle in the dead of night and I always have a vision of madcap ‘Beetlejuice’ at the controls, racing across the country in his quest for excitement and new horizons.  Then again, maybe I drank too much cranberry.

Far from the antics of beetlejuice, we spent the morning performing songs and doing interviews at the local classical radio station.  Tenors, by and large, are not morning people as they are inherently lazy, their bodies know this, and like to wait until late afternoon at least before stretching their necks, flexing their diaphragms and gargling out a few strangled sounds.  Singing at ten in the morning is hard work. 

‘To work, however, is to pray’ as the Benedictines tell us, and entering a classical radio station is, in many ways, like going into a church.  There is an air of hush.  Classical music has a smell of sanctity about it.  You notice that, after a piece ends, there is a respectful ten seconds before somebody comes out of a closet to tell you the key, the weight of the composer, the combined age of the orchestra, the type and colour of the microphone used, down to the blue socks that the conductor was wearing.  I have visions of Mozart rising from the grave and raising hell in there, laughing like a maniac, throwing water-coolers out the window, grabbing a presenter and dancing frantically around the corridors, stuffing doughnuts in his mouth while pounding the grand piano with one hand and a foot.  All done in the best of taste in C sharp minor, of course.  We, on the other hand, were on best behaviour.  Genuflected and bowed at all the right moments.  The sweet aftertaste of our designer deodorant still hung like incense in the air well into the afternoon.  Later, at the hotel, I witnessed two doormen arguing in Spanish about who should take an old lady’s bags.  Her hair was freakishly flamboyant and looked powdered.  What was really strange is that she was humming a snippet from ‘Don Giovanni’ in an Austrian accent.  She dropped a smirk in my direction.  Maybe I should warn the radio people.

Its heading for the eighties in downtown Houston and the sparrows are working the grid under the tables at Starbucks like pickpockets at the fair in Cahermee.  I’m sure about the coffee house but not so sure about the birds – I think they are sparrows but nobody can reach in here and throttle me while telling me that I’m wrong.  Two pigeons swoop down like military police to scatter the small army but, once they move along, the sparrows are back in like a crack forensic team.  They have the cute puppy routine down to a fine art,  short-stepping up to your feet,  cocking the head from side to side, giving a sweet pitiful chirp until you reluctantly part with a few crumbs of your triple chocolate double fudge cake – enough caffeine and preservative to keep them perched on a branch for at least a month after death.  This is Babel.  Every race, colour, and creed seems to be represented on this small patch outside of the coffee house.  All talking together, wireless, careless, sometimes brainless, babbling, to each other, to wires hanging from their mouths,  to speaker phones on tables, smarming, fighting, schmoozling, flirting, instructing, lots of she said he said, very few listening.  Young ladies peck away at their laptops just like the lovelies of yesteryear would sit in the sun by the door of a cottage and rattle away with knitting needles.  Its all about the technology of the moment

In a musty attic somewhere in the United States there is a box of old photographs.  Hidden among the hundreds of pictures that your folks took on that trip to Ireland in the late sixties, there may be one of me on a donkey.  It was taken among the rough mounds of old wiry grass on the Old Head of Kinsale.  A little designer stubble is still to be found there today but mostly it is close-shaven and smooth as befits the spectacular golf course it has become.  No more donkey droppings.  No more school pals being photographed by Yanks on a sunny Sunday afternoon.  No chasing each other on rattling bikes to the shop a few miles away to buy ice-cream with our proceeds from our modeling job.

After the concert in New Jersey, a young man from the orchestra spoke to me of donkeys.  No, he was not talking about the brass section.  One of his great joys in life is going to his ancestral home in County Mayo every summer where his relatives still keep donkeys and even use them to draw turf from the bog.  Old Ireland is not dead and gone.  The guy on second fiddle has it hidden up in Mayo.  The good thing about donkeys is that they do not run on oil.  Cross them with a Canadian goose, they fly, our troubles are over.

At the airport in Los Angeles a bushy eye-browed middle aged man held up a sign which read ‘Krins, Selly, Rait’.  If you think they were a firm of lawyers coming in from Turkey, you are wrong.  What is more disturbing is that he did not speak a word of English.  He looked at us and grunted at the sign.  There were three of us – he had three names – it looked like a safe bet.  We followed him in silence.  Who says we don’t like adventure.

As you fly into Los Angeles on a clear night, free of the notorious smog, it is indeed tinsel town.  It seems to have millions of pea lights twinkling from every square inch.  More lights than any other city in the world.  But then I hear you say, it has more stars per square inch than any other city in the world whose beady eyes flash to the heavens hungry for new ‘start-lets’ or wishing them off into the pacific tide if they are younger, skinnier, more beautiful than the hordes already parading around their back yards with little lights on their heads - red-assed ants warning of overcrowding.  In New York people don’t look at you in the street.  They don’t want to draw you on them.  They dress in black and walk with purpose.  In Los Angeles, everybody looks at everybody else on the street because they want to see if you are somebody.  They dress funky and eat in Japanese juice bars. 

Right in the middle of West Hollywood there was a yard full of Christmas trees.  Outside the gate a gaggle of paparazzi with elephant trunk lenses were on safari alert.  I peeked in to see if Danny de Vito was chewing pine needles perched on a branch but all I could see was Victoria Beckham pouting at a dancing squirrel who had just made off with a miniature furry scarf which she had been wearing, mistaking it for his maiden aunt who had left home to marry Jack Nicholson and hadn’t been seen since.  A wardrobe malfunction was declared.  With no scarf, it was a wrap.  She tottered off into the deli next door to get some salami for Davy’s lunch.