Last night in Leitrim, Bernie roasted a chicken, salty-skinned and crumb-stuffed, served with a slice of bacon, mashed buttery turnip, plenty of gravy from the packet, and tough marrow peas that had been soaked overnight and boiled plain. After dinner I wrote a little before heading downstairs for my usual cognac and chatting late into the night about family, deaths, movies, the Olympics and social networking sites.

I thought of my little Diaryland site, a plot of code and numbers staked in the middle of nowhere, which I can't bear to leave despite more populous suburbs with better amenities, tumblr and wordpress and blogspot and the like, because here it's home, garden and library and stairs leading up to an attic where I've written the course of my life over a dozen years, through loves, heartbreak, deaths, opportunities missed and snatched, and sudden thunderous joys.

The next day I took the bus from Sligo, sitting behind cheese-and-onion crisp-eaters while a girl in safety-pinned slashed black jeans hacked up her lungs behind me. Rare sunlight streamed in as I wrote and later I put away my laptop, dozing as fields rolled by, dappled in yellow and fuchsia and white.

Home is always improvised - an online diary perhaps; photos in proper frames to lend their beloved subjects the gravity of place; a bedroom I occupy a weekend a month, windows open to squawking rooks, in a labyrinthine house huddled around the pub that is its constant heart.




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