With country music's great outlaw (drug addict, pyromaniac and the

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Aug 24, 2003 | by Vicky Allan

This is typical of Cash. Her children come first, well ahead of her career. I tell her my mother once said she would have liked to have gone on having babies for ever. She laughs, nodding, "I would have too. She's right. There's some women that just ... you always want a newborn in the house. It infuses the very atoms of the air with some kind of magic.

"Chelsea, my daughter who's 21, when she left home for college, I was distraught. I couldn't believe it. I'm gonna cry now thinking about it. I could not believe how painful it was. And I remember kind of wailing to her as she left the house, 'Am I going to have to keep having more children, to feed into the machine? Will you keep leaving me?"

This is one of the ways she's different from her father. To her, music isn't everything. It's just some small part. I'm reminded of something she said earlier. "You know, my father's been very weak, but even when confined to a wheelchair he still goes to the studio. I think he would die if he stopped. If I stopped I'd just get really really fat."

And, as she goes on telling stories about Chelsea who would make a great writer and her step-daughter who is starting up a theatre school for kids, it's only then that I notice. I study the blank white linen of the table. The Man in Black has all but disappeared u Rules Of Travel is out now