Random memory: leaving a movie theatre (really a small Georgian house on Nun’s Island in Galway), where a friend and I had watched a Kurosawa film, and feeling the intense reality of my surroundings. Nothing about my days then were as lucid as that moment emerging into a dark wintry January night, the light from lampposts prickling my skin and the canals shining in the moonlight. My senses had been amplified by the experience of Kurosawa, and the most ordinary things had become extraordinary. Everything felt more real than my own life, like my past was just a strange shadow, and I was born only at that moment.

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