I met John many years ago, when looking for accommodation in a regional town which has since become as large as a city. The person I replaced in a job was moving to another location and suggested I contact the landlord of his accommodation.

John owned a tall rickety building, divided into flats. Most of the tenants were single people, working in salaried jobs. It was a time when, mostly, people did not live together unless they were married. So a kind of community grew up among the tenants.

They bid each other time of day, but respected privacy. They were very house-proud. On a fine day, we might meet in the long garden and exchange bits and pieces of conversation, but never enough to pry into each other's lives.

One did of course get to know them. One male tenant worked in a bank and played hurling, another single man was in a high-tech company and relentlessly played jazz at weekends. The handsome lady on the top floor did "something in the office" of a convent which had a girls' school attached.

The garden of shaped shrubs was her effort: she could look out upon it from their top floor. John, the landlord, looked after all of us, in the sense of asking us if everything was all right. Usually, too, everything was all right. The water ran from taps, the loos on the landings flushed, the electricity came on when switched. The roof, for all its age, seemed intact.

He collected the weekly rents on a Saturday morning, when he came into town, where he left "the wife and children" to do the shopping. Sometimes I met him coming down from the lady in the in the top flat, wiping flakes of cake from his mouth.

He was often up a ladder fiddling with cables. Being a middle-aged farmer, he did not believe in hiring tradesmen to do a job. He installed the central heating himself, which left a few problems of leaking pipes, until that, too, was settled by him spending a few hours tracing the problem.

Always, when a problem was fixed, he would say: "Hah, there now - that's settled." The tall windows of the old Georgian pile were rickety and the gaps stuffed with fading newspapers, but in my time he never got around to replacing them with double glazing, though it meant icy draughts in winter. The ESB bill was totted in individual meters.

I thought of him the other day, when business took me into that town where I had not been for years. The tall house still stood, a museum piece beside all the new developments of townhouses and apartments.

The gracious hall door had a recent lick of paint but the windows still seemed rickety. The granite steps were even more out of kilter and the brickwork had chipped and flaked, badly needing re-pointing.

I wanted to knock and introduce myself to whoever answered. But I suppressed the impulse. Some things are best left as we imagine them. Going on the state of the house, I doubt if John still does running repairs or has the puff to make his way to the top floor, to the lady who "did something in the convent".