Oliver Jeffers featuring the Pop chair

I was at COP 26 and making an installation in the blue zone and for the security badge they didn't have "artist" so they put me down as a "translator and observer" and I thought that was pretty apt. Also – artist, storyteller. Human.

Brooklyn, New York and Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Right now, in Brooklyn, we are sort of in between places so my studio has a small, shall we say reclining nook with a sleeping loft and when I am there, I am there working, hosting salons, making art, experimenting.

And then in Northern Ireland we have a very lovely kind of large 1832 Georgian townhouse. We is my wife Suzanne and our kids Harland and Mari. We had pets until this past Friday. Scampi left us. She was 12, old and decaying. Time took its toll on her.

Belfast is the city where I grew up in and where I spent my formative adult years. It’s a city of story tellers and deep long history but also division. So there's a sense of duality about this place that has informed my work for a long time and the idea that I can hold two opposing notions in my head at the same time.

But then there's a palpable energy about New York. People always say that New York is a melting pot but that's not even close to being true because that implies homogenization and everyone being the same. I heard somebody describe New York as a salad, which I think is a great description for it. There's kinetic energy there, everything seems possible, and it is where I met some of the best friends I'll ever have in my life.

My family were not about stuff. My mum was sick and my dad was working class. When he moved out of the house that we all grew up in, after having lived there for 30 years, he was able to do so in one carload with a chair tied to the roof. But my wife' family is of Norwegian heritage and some furniture pieces from them which are old Victorian sideboards.

I started collecting some bits. I have a small Mies van der Rohe sideboard and an Eames lounger. And then there's a new designer coming up called Patrick Weder, and I have a few of his pieces as well. So I’m starting to make a collection of future heirlooms.

St. Patrick's day is actually an American holiday. Halloween is more Irish than St. Patrick's day. Every country has a patron saint, most don't know who it is. The Irish, when they immigrated to America, they were one of the last and so they were on the bottom rung of the ladder beneath everybody else. And as a show of strength, and a non-aggressive show of strength, they decided to have a parade and St. Patrick's Day seemed to be as good a reason as any. So it turned into a New York Irish American thing that eventually started to be celebrated back here.

But Halloween, on the other hand, is an ancient Irish pagan festival, warding off evil spirits. And the night before the spirits return bonfires were built, and people would want to bring an ember from the bonfire home to protect their homes through the night, and the only way they could think to do that was to carve a turnip and put an ember in because it wouldn't go out. When they got to America, they couldn't find turnips, but they discovered that pumpkins are so much easier to carve.

I've started a garden since I came back to Belfast, and that takes time. I'm trying to grow some herbs, starting off easy. I've got a rose bush I planted last year that might actually bloom next month, which I'm excited about.

Also, the ideas, the concepts I have that permeate my work, they need time to marinate. I need to sit with them and think with them and almost leaving them alone and then go back and look at them again. Concepts take time.

Myself, actually. Just slow brain quiet time where I can just go for a walk. There's always somebody that needs something done - a child, my employees, a publisher or somebody.

Good things take time, like concepts. Or a pint of Guinness. “Good things come to those who wait” is their tag line.

Probably a ladder. I feel like I was blessed with a step ladder early on in my life to be able to see above the everyday-ness of life that affords me the simplicity to translate the way in which I do. Yeah, it’s metaphorical.

When my mum died it was in my final year of art college. Suddenly all the things that I had been worried were important, I realized were not. I could suddenly see the things that were important, and it felt like I'd been given a vantage point. I was young enough to still be malleable but old enough to know what to do with it. I often liken it to a step ladder.