MORE SELECTED entries from my Ballina diary of late sixties:

Monday, November 18th, 1968

Miss Cartwright arrived back in the library this morning. I hardly knew what to say with the memory of our supper date still horribly fresh in my mind. Fortunately I was busy stamping four of the large print thrillers with which the decaying Mrs O'Mara is obsessed. Miss Cartwright whispered that she felt our relationship would "burgeon" from now on. I said I certainly hoped so. Then I went into the toilet with the first volume of the O.E.D under my jumper and looked up the word. My nervousness was not allayed.

Tuesday

I have finally finished Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. How he suffered for his art! I too must avoid the entangling nets of language, nationality and religion. At least Joyce had the freedom of Dublin. Had he lived in Ballina he might never have written at all - there would not be much forging in the smithy of his soul, that's for sure.

Wednesday

I dallied longer than normal in Moylett's Cafe this morning, the reason being the new waitress. She is certainly loud, and managed to slop most of my coffee in the saucer, but is undeniably attractive in purely physical terms.

I have heard that Joyce, despite his great intellect, ran off with some sort of servant girl. Perhaps I too should cease searching for a soul mate and seek out some simple happy creature uninterested in the higher spheres of the imagination. Certainly I made a terrible mistake choosing Maureen, with whom for two years I "wasted my sweetness on the desert air", as the poet said. I am a little wiser now, I hope.

Thursday

Mother, who has still not got over father's modest job promotion (Assistant Quality Controller Plastic Balls), is now gibbering excitedly of an "en suite" for the "master bedroom". I remind her that we live in a modest terraced house here in Ardnaree and that the so called master bedroom is only marginally bigger than my own cubicle. If they attempt to squeeze a bathroom into it, the bed will have to go - that is if the house does not actually fall down first. But I fear it is too late. Mother has probably already spent half the price of this proposed extravagance on interior design magazines.

I wouldn't mind but the younger members of this family are loath to use the only bathroom we have.

Friday

The Western People was left in my bedroom this morning, opened rather obviously at the Appointments page. I find it ironic that my parents were at first concerned when I could not get employment, and are now worried that I have it. I am actually quite happy in the library, apart from the nervousness induced in me by Miss Cartwright. Mother, however,will not rest until I have permanent and pensionable employment in some soul destroying office.

Would she, I ask, take pleasure in seeing me involved with crude commerce and the despoiling of widows and orphans? "You'd have to be married a while first", is her response.

Mother has raised the non sequitur to an art form.

Saturday

I am walking down around Belleek on my own when I come across the Moylett waitress - fishing! Laughing, she tells me brazenly she is actually stroke hauling, and shows me a fine salmon she has already poached. I am amazed. I watch her impale a wriggling pink worm on the weighted triple hook and step to the river's edge in her thigh high green waders, long fair hair blowing in the wind.

Her raucous laughter makes my skin tingle as I walk on. There is something about her open lawlessness that holds extraordinary allure for me. As yet I do not even know her name.

Sunday

What a microcosm of life in this tiny European backwater is reflected in the Western People. To judge by the multitude of small ads, many readers' sole interest is in the show and sale of weanlings and the purchasing of point of lay pullets, growing broilers and turkeys.

But there is admirable raw passion in these simple people too. It is hard not to thrill to the paper's regular court reports of people battling with bar stools or beer mugs, caught up in altercations where honour has perhaps been queried, casting powerful tribal accusations like "shitehawk" and "bog dwarf bollocks" at one another, and finding inventive defences for the dull charges levelled against them.

I am always disappointed when the defendants' actions are described in court as being "totally out of character." The truth is they are nearly always in character. We are a fierce, passionate imaginative people and should be proud of the fact, rather than make excuses. {CORRECTION} 96101600108