I WAS interested to read the interview in these pages the other day with gorgeous American writer Naomi Wolf, the woman who famously championed the sexual revolution as the dawn of "the female erotic millennium."

She is now warning us about the resultant moral vacuum, which sounds a lot drearier.

Anyway, Naomi told interviewer Anna Mundow how in her youth she rebelled against her hippie Jewish parents by "eroticising the other" having a fling on an Israeli kibbutz with an Irish boy called Devin, who later disappointed Ms Wolf by sending her a photograph of himself outside the carpet store he managed in a small country town.

"I never even wrote back", she recalls. "I hope he forgave me."

Not many people may be aware that my middle name is Devin. But I remember Naomi very well. I was naturally disappointed that she never wrote back to me.

Hoolihan's Carpetdrome, Toomevara, Co Tipperary, but Naomi need not worry: I have long forgiven her.

Yet I have not forgotten her. Our days (and nights) on the kibbutz near Tel Aviv all those years ago are a memory that will never fade.

As a result of reading (or possibly misreading) some intense article in The Word, I went out to Israel as a fairly innocent 20 year old eager to help the poor people of Jerusalem better their lot. When I got there I found that their lot was a lot better than mine, in that they all seemed to possess every luxury known to man but I was assured that things were different in the countryside.

So it was that I found myself in the small kibbutz at Bani Hassan, in the mountains east of Tel Aviv. The principal activity was the planting of aubergines, for which my turnip snagging experience on the small family farm at home proved invaluable.

The other young people involved were not so used to hard work, and one night I was called on to give a back massage to a young woman who had scarcely stopped talking since her arrival.

When I discovered that Naomi - for it was she came from the Haight Ashbury area of San Francisco, I was hugely excited. The year was 1970, but of course the sixties Were only just hitting Ireland, and I was eager to embrace all aspects of the alternative culture, flower power and the summer of love, or indeed any available season.

I was initially disappointed. Naomi had just begun a step by step rejection of the "squalid" hippie life indulged in by her parents, who sounded to me like the perfect father. and mother, and most unlike the Pleistocene conservatives with whom it had been my misfortune to be landed. At the same time she told me she was "setting her own agenda" and was looking forward to "the female erotic millennium."

This sounded more promising, though the only word I understood in her latter phrase was "female" and from Naomi's point of view I did not understand it in any meaningful way (and as it turned out, never would).

Nevertheless, Naomi said she felt good karma in my presence and suggested that an experimental Gaelic cultural catharsis of open sexuality based on the recognition of mutual awakening in the budding soul might well lead to an epiphany of the transcendent spirit.

I said I thought so too. And that's how it all started between Naomi and me. Although pretty intense for a while, it certainly made the daily aubergine planting regime more bearable over the next few weeks.

Yet, as time passed, the odd thing was that the more Naomi talked on (and on and on) about "eroticising the other" and exploring the sensual, the less erotic or sensual it became for me: though we all hated the sight of aubergines by now, I began to look forward to the solitude and silence in which we planted them.

There came a night when, in a moment of ill considered facetiousness, I explained to Naomi what "the other" (as in "a bit of") meant in my home country. She was not amused. In her view, sexuality was knot something to snigger at.

We parted on frosty terms, and I returned to Ireland shortly afterwards. A chance meeting in a public hours with an old family friend, John Joe Hoolihan, led to my employment in his start up venture, the carpetdrome already mentioned, in Toomevara. From there I wrote to but knew in my heart she would not reply.

Our main business in Hoolihan's was the standard fitted Youghal carpet, but we also ran a surprisingly profitable sideline in Mid Eastern kilims I imported personally from a small Israeli manufacturer in the mountain area east of Tel Aviv.

They were full of colour, energy and expression, and my "Naomi" range, as I fondly called it, helped brighten many a dull home.