Where was i …? About to tell you how I earn my living. I do odd jobs for newspapers – write book reviews, features on entertaining topics, arty pieces and interviews with reasonably famous people … not film stars. i draw the line at film stars. My main source of income though is lecturing. I am by profession a lecturer in Modern Irish Literature. Not Synge, Yeats or Joyce. That’s a mug’s game; that’s big business these days, something I have no head for at all. I took a year’s sabbatical from Trinity College several years ago and got a taste for the roving life. I discovered that the world is full of universities delighted to give me a year’s work talking to their students about Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Francis Stuart, Aidan Higgins, John Banville, Sean O’Faolain … the list is endless and growing every day. I stick with prose writers: talking about poetry to an ocean of undergraduates makes me feel ill in the head. And i bring things home from my travels and stack them round the walls of my little house here in Dalkey. Centre of the World. Then I come here to lick my wounds and eat my mother’s jam, take big deep breaths and get ready to go away again.

At this moment in my life I listen to a lot of music, i sing in the bath and the kitchen, i read books by writers who are younger than I am; sometimes I find it quite difficult to breathe and the doctor has told me not to lift heavy weights or laugh too hard. I don’t really see much around me to laugh about, and yet I have always needed to laugh. Someone, some Irish writer but stupidly i can’t put a name on him at this moment, said, ‘Take away this cursed gift of laughter and give us tears instead.’ He was right, of course. Laughter is one of our curses in this country. Great roaring jeering laughter, titters behind the hand, satire, mischief, savage little jokes. We don’t seem to be able to manage without any of that. Anyway i have to manage for another few weeks or my stomach may burst open and all sorts of horrible things fall out.

I walk each day, quite gently up here to the top of Killiney Hill and sit in the sun by the obelisk watching the mothers with prams and the toddlers running over the grass and the real walkers striding out, their hips swinging satisfactorily from side to side. Soon i will be fit enough to do that too and then I won’t want to do it; i will want to go to Sydney or Ascension Island or Anchorage – now there’s a name to conjure with. I will take my abilities with me and when I come home, for indubitably, this will always be home, I will bring with me more odds and ends and stack them neatly round the walls of my house.