For some reason foreign interviewers often ask if, at heart, I feel more like a novelist or more like a poet. It’s a question I can’t answer as I can never tell, but I wonder if there is a clue in this photo taken last week when I went to do some January writing in Portugal. I suspect that any true novelist would have immediately headed for the sunlit climes of the Algarve. But looking at this snap of me, taken as I headed up in a steep hill in the mist to enter the grounds of a ruined castle beside the restored hilltop medieval convent where I had a room, I am starting to suspect that, at heart, I am probably the reincarnation of some 19th century Gothic Dublin poet, feeling the ghosts of Sheridan Le Fanu and James Clarence Mangan shuffling alongside me in the mist. However unlike these troubled greats – with their chronic addictions to opium and disreputable concoctions of so called “green tea” – I stuck firmly to my own drug of choice: the Portuguese version of Lemsip, perhaps with the occasional late night Portuguese brandy thrown in, mainly due to the fact that it was impossible to teach any of the barmen in the village the delicate alchemy involved in making a good hot Irish whiskey.
