I was a waitress at a really rundown Italian restaurant in Dublin, for about a week, at 16. I thought it was going to be romantic - overhearing affairs and watching first-time couples all loved up. But instead I was just running about constantly.
As a chind in Dublin, I can remember having my plate piled high with four or five vegetables - and I'm convinced to this day that my mother's home cooking helped to ward off illness.
I'm pleased to say I grew up in a happy family in Dublin. I feel we're very close.
I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.
In my thirties I found myself, to use a colloquial fiction, in a suburban house at the foothills of the Dublin mountains. Married and with two little daughters, I led a life which would have been recognizable to any woman who had led it and to many others who had not.
I saw Damien Rice in Dublin when I was 13, and that inspired me to want to pursue being a songwriter... I practised relentlessly and started recording my own EPs. At 16, I moved to London and played any gigs I could, selling CDs from my rucksack to fund recording the next, and it snowballed from there.
My first competition outside Kenya was at the 2002 world cross country championships in Dublin, Ireland. I finished fifth in the junior race that day but the thing I remember the most was that it was very cold.
After I graduated from college, while traveling around Europe, hitchhiking, doing the tourist thing, I went into a church in Dublin.
I attended the bedside of a friend who was dying in a Dublin hospital. She lived her last hours in a public ward with a television blaring out a football match, all but drowning our final conversation.
The truth is that I am in love with Dublin. I think it is the most beautiful town that I have ever seen, mountains at the back and the sea in front, and long roads winding through decaying suburbs and beautiful woods.
