Is this vacation or purgatory? Every day is the same in Leitrim. Cloud-shrouded peaks. Crappy movies. Rugby or football on the telly. Walks in seaside towns, where there's nothing to do but watch the surfers, drink in dark pubs, grub on bowls of too-creamy chowder tasting of the sea. I pine for my bike, paints, an art show to kick the synapses alive. In the evenings we await the steel din of cutlery. The salty unctuous aromas of Mammy's cooking: roast meat, buttery cabbage, mashed turnip. And, with the exception of Good Friday and Christmas Day, there is ever the gentle din of drinkers in the pub downstairs, where I once found a bag of russet spuds under a chair while sweeping up last night's crisp-flecked remains.

While waiting here, I finished one fantasy trilogy, and I am halfway through the second book of another, tales of magicians, evil elves, boy thieves, rifts linking one world to another. Apt, I think, to read them, waiting for the summer to wither in a country where ruined castles jostle ghost estates, surfers carve waves that will lap at the black skeleton of a beached Spanish galleon, and cattle graze by the bog where a deposed king lies decapitated, with his head in a leather sack.

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