For the past three years, Artair MacCleod has been living in an old lifeboat station, overlooking the estuary of the Camel River. At low tide he looks out on the river’s deep channel to broad mudflats. He has gradually moved towards the edges of the country as if centrifugal forces are pulling him there: in fact the force is the availability of grants in the regions, places that are thought to need help with the arts, because life there is culturally thin and can only be sustained by subsidy. The fiction endures because the people in these regions have votes, even if they have little spontaneously produced culture. So Artair, himself a playwright and actor manager, has gradually migrated from the metropolis to various provincial cities and finally – there is nowhere further he can go without a boat – to this estuary.

His grand project is to produce a five-hour play based on the life and novels of Flann O’Brien. But today he has taken a break to start hand-writing his manuscript, because he has heard that a university in Texas will pay good money for original manuscripts; his is, in fact, mostly a cut-and-paste job from the work of O’Brien, with stage directions added in marker pen. He has laboriously written out six pages of the first part of his play. The whole project has taken him three years so far and he still has to write episodes three to five, inclusive. He has written to the trust, which pays him a stipend, asking for a special grant to allow him to suspend his other activities – now largely children’s plays, done with a nod towards Gaelic or Cornish – so that he can devote himself to finishing this major project, which, he wrote, is soon to enter pre-production. He anticipates negotiations for a suitably grand Celtic location to stage this epic work, which will be a landmark production for the minority cultures, but pre-production and development come at a cost. He has had no reply in the three months since he first wrote but he has also been busy approaching various arts organisations and the Arts Council itself.

In order to make the original manuscript authentic, he is using an old Waterman’s fountain pen and some woven paper, which laps up the ink. He believes this will add to the verisimilitude. He is writing out what will be the play’s manifesto and opening scene: the narrator, Flann O’Brien, is addressing his friend Brinsley over a few pints. Brinsley, to be honest, doesn’t have much of a part. He’s more the straight man. They are sitting in the snug of the Red Swan in Dublin.