Our ‘Concise Oxford English Dictionary’ smells of cigarette smoke still because Martin le Vay gave it to our children when he turned against it. All he cared about was books, but periodically he’d rebel and give them all away to friends or passers-by. To explain this policy he wrote a poet’s memoir, a million words in length, and left it under lock and key, in the Nat West Bank on the High Street, where I suppose it remains, five years now after his death.

But when he banished books from the republic of his head, with its strict rules and regulations and depressions, he never lost a word the way we others do. In the early hours, he smoked and planned what he would write when the sun had risen and the rain had stopped, and the words stood ready at his beck and call with the blackbirds of a bright April morning.

Bernard O'Donoghue's most recent collection is Farmers Cross