I have been inundated with a request to publish further extracts from my diary of life in Ballina, Co Mayo, in the late 1960s.
January 1st, 1969
The new year dawns, or did, some hours ago. I am hung over, of course, but not too badly, considering the night with Seanin in the fleshpots of Foxford. Yet though my head throbs, my mind is oddly clear.
Perhaps this is a good omen for the year to come. At the same time, changes in hangover symptoms can be worrying. I may have a Bloody Mary at lunch-time if my mental clarity retains this strange crystal edge. Miss Cartright swears by its restorative properties, though of course she does not actually swear, at least in my hearing.
Mother and father are also sleeping late after their evening visit to their friends, the Hobans, involving no doubt a good deal of Redbreast whisky and sparkling wine which mother will later tell me was champagne.
Jack and Mary Hoban are marginally higher up on the social scale than my parents, Jack being a salesman, or sales executive as mother reverentially puts it, in the grotesque replacement windows trade, while his wife runs a ladies' fashion store, Arabella's.
Mary Hoban gets upset when the shop is referred to as "Mary Hoban's". In this I sympathise with her: like myself, she has to cope with the depressing literal mind-set of this town. Anyone making an imaginative leap, however modest, must be dragged back down.
Anyway, the combined Hoban loot - Miss Cartwright told me there is not a single frock in Arabella's costing less than £20 - affords the Hobans quite a decent standard of living, and more importantly, allows them to lord it over most of their friends.
January 4th
Back to work in the library. I must think seriously again about broadening my career horizons. I cannot live out my entire life as a junior assistant librarian, grade four. It is demeaning. Yet I will not surrender to the greasy arms of commerce. Where, oh where is there a niche for someone of moderate artistic ambition who wishes to live a simple but fulfilled life and leave even a faint footprint on the sands of time (Longfellow - the hugely moral American poet)? Not in Ballina, of that I am sure.
January 5th
I ran into the Hobans, mother and son, this morning when wandering down Tone Street. They were getting out of Mary Hoban's Wolseley Hornet.
Mary Hoban is probably one of the few women in this town with her own car, and naturally the town cannot forgive her for this. When she puts the Hornet in her garage, the entire town sniggers at the way she puts the stress on the second syllable, a harmless enough pronunciation, but one she certainly did not learn when growing up in Tobercurry.
She is not a bad-looking woman, however, and has always been pleasant to me.
It has been a while since I met Sebastian (!), the only Hoban offspring. He is now a long lanky 23, and rather foppishly dressed, I thought, for a career as an insurance official in Sligo. He greeted me very effusively, I must say.
Seb is constantly being held up to me by mother as a paragon and no doubt she will be singing his praises now she has seen him again this Christmas. I suspect she is already pairing him off in her mind with Sally.
If so, Sally will be the last to know. My younger sister is so far removed from everyday life on this planet she could have twins with Sebastian before realising she had become his paramour.
January 8th
Miss Cartright skips into the library this morning like a schoolgirl (she is 38, I have discovered), welcoming the new year as if it were an Irish Sweepstakes win or a dotey little spring lamb, and wondering aloud excitedly what it might bring "in the way of life, love, romance and who knows what?".
I am embarrassed on her behalf.
January 15th
Mother and father have announced their decision to purchase a car! The family is thrown into paroxysms of excitement. I cannot say I am displeased myself, but it distresses me to see my poor mother so easily impressed by gaudy consumer goods. She almost fainted when our second-ever new television arrived last year.
I know, however, that the decision on make and model will occupy my father for a least a month, and I can forget about introducing any late-night discussions on the evils of capitalism. I will hold my counsel until the brochures start pouring in. Their ludicrously seductive sales language and glossy presentation will make a good starting-point for my thesis.