Okay, here I am back at it.
By special request, for the Edge-ophiles:
"I was a very cute toddler; I've seen the photographs. But then at around the age of five something started to happen that radically changed my appearance. We are not talking here about some accidental injury or anything medical, but a gradual transformation. And I don't mean to suggest that I became one of the obviuolsy ugly kids, more that my appearance started to inspire a certain mild alarm in adults who caught sight of me for the first time, and to elicit sympathetic and vaguely disappointed looks from my parents. My head grew, quite quickly, to an unfeasably large size. It was not a disagreeable head, in certain contexts it was quite handsome, but from the age of five as a result of this unusual development I started to look unnervingly like the kid on the cover of Mad magazine. Along with the head came the teeth, or specifically my two big front teeth. When they first appeared sprouting out of my gums, I knew there was something up. Their size was obvious from the beginning, and they grew in with a kind of terrible inevitability. No matter what form of mouth management I employed there was just no hiding them, so by age seven the full 'Mad magazine' look was complete. This was made all the more difficult by the fact that my best friend Shane, a person from whom I was pretty much inseparable from the age of two, was a dead ringer for a young Paul Newman, complete with cornflower-blue eyes and perfect teeth. He knew it, as did everybody else. A year older than me, Shane was superpopular, a great athlete and in many ways my nemesis. I went through some very formative years as the proverbial ugly duckling with my mate Shane a constant reminder that I was nothing special. The upshot was that I grew even more shy and awkward. I think that kind of experience is either the making or the breaking of you. And in my case having a very supportive home life helped a lot, but I didn't see that at the time....
My sister, Gillian, was born in 1963 into our male-dominated household. It took us a while to get used to her. I think my nose was put seriously out of joint when she arrived. I was the apple of my mother's eye up until that point, or certainly until I started to grow the large head....
My brother and I always had a very close rapport, and very similar sense of humour and general outlook. We hung out together, created various types of homemade explosives, petrol bombs, built bonfires, went on joyrides with our friends in dumper trucks borrowed from local construction sites, all the usual sort of stuff. And if people didn't quite understand us, we understood each other. We were a bit of a handful but very good-natured. It was the combination of curiosity, wildness, lack of strict parental control, and access to a fully stocked school chemistry lab that led to our experiments, anything really to break the tedium of the Dublin suburbs of the 1970s....
My best friend Shane was in my class at St. Andrew's. I was a year younger than the rest of the class and it was decided during my final year that I wasn't old enough to graduate. Shane went ahead into the big school and we sort of lost touch with each other. I met him one day soon after he had started at Mount Temple and he told me about this wild kid in his class called Paul Hewson. He seemed to share our interest on high explosives; there was some sort of story involving a small fire and some riveting caps taken from the building site that was to become our new school. So I heard about Bono a couple of years before I even met him. You could say his reputation preceded him."
There's much, much more about his childhoood, and a really funny picture of himself and his friend Shane looking exactly as he described them both: one impossibly handsome, the other an Alfred E. Neuman dead-ringer. Hilarious! He's very droll, and very articulate.