I will see his ghost on Thursday when I walk up High Street in Kilkenny where, as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, Sean O'Reilly - one of the finest writers of his generation on these islands - will read with one of the baldest writers of my generation, namely myself.
Thankfully, the event is in the Ormond Hotel. I say "thankfully" not just because my family know from experience that the Ormond is an exceptionably comfortable establishment, but also because it is one of the few Kilkenny hotels where I am certain that I am not barred.
You see, the Ormond did not exist 25 years ago when I made my first contribution to the Kilkenny Arts Festival. This involved sharing a tent with Thom McGinty, the man whose ghost I always see there. Later he became famous as The Diceman for his street performances. But back then he was just Thom, or "The Dandelion Clown" or "the naked fellow at the counter who has you all barred". In 1979 we were in Kilkenny with a cocktail of people known as the Grapevine Roadshow who performed on the streets or in Rothe House and camped out by the river in the shadow of Kilkenny Castle.
On the first night Thom persuaded me to sit up with him just for the buzz which he told me I'd experience from witnessing dawn break over the river. When the sun rose I blacked out into sleep. I woke at 9.30 to see Thom returning from the town, looking contented and well fed, just as the assorted musicians and performers were emerging from tents. He announced that he had been to a most wonderful hotel - the Clubhouse - where, if you simply sat down in the dining-room, they asked you for a room number and if you picked a number at random they provided you with a marvellous breakfast. The people at the Clubhouse were the most wondrously philanthropic patrons of the arts he had ever come across.
Amazingly, it worked for Thom three times before the Clubhouse barred him and all associated with him. Showing true forbearance, they never called the police because while it might have been a fraudulent act with anyone else, you cannot accuse someone of deception who has a broad Scottish accent and openly walks around Kilkenny for days afterwards wearing the same long black frock. Thom wasn't pretending to be someone else when helping himself to breakfast because there was only one Thom and he could never be anyone other than himself.
Being himself meant being openly gay in Kilkenny a quarter-century ago. Late at night, as we left Kytler's Inn or descended the back steps of the Marble City Bar, it was not uncommon for a gang of local thugs to sniff out that there was something different (and therefore threatening) about Thom. My honed Finglas instinct was to find the nearest alley and run. Thom's approach was different. Opening his arms wide, he ran towards them, crying "Rough trade, I love it". Like brainless thugs everywhere they took one look and scattered in confusion, running for their virtue and their lives.
It would be wrong to say that Thom spent the whole of that Arts Week in a long black frock. Event organisers who presumed that he might provide cheap "colour" invariably got more than they bargained for because Thom's first instinct after having several drinks was to strip naked and stroll casually around. Thankfully, next Thursday's reading is not in the delightful Newpark Hotel because I suspect I am probably still barred from it ever since the night when Thom danced naked at the Arts Week Ball.
Still, I worry lest I give a wrong impression of Thom. He was a deeply warm and humane person to whom the most unlikely people responded. He was also a talented and dedicated artist who would stand still on a street even when gurriers tried to set his costume alight. In the run-down Dublin of the 1970s he brought immediate colour into our lives while living in a succession of flats in semi-derelict Georgian buildings.
He did not just do street performances, he posed for life-drawing, taught mime at the Grapevine Centre and devised deeply affecting experimental performances. He scraped a living, never imagining that one day in February 1995 his coffin would be carried down Grafton Street to applause from the ordinary Dubliners whose lives he touched.
In his final years he enjoyed success and some financial security. But I never knew he had AIDS until he made a brave and funny appearance on the Late Late Show in November 1994. Thom removed the stigma from AIDS. His Late Late appearance must have been important for so many sufferers.
I last saw him at a farewell night for him at the Olympia. The place was packed with people who loved him, the stage populated by his fellow street acts. They crowned him the King of Dublin and as the crowd roared its approval it seemed no idle boast, because he really was the king of all misfits, dropouts, artists, dreamers and anyone who dared to be different.
Next Thursday I'll remember him in Kilkenny, moving down High Street like a pied piper with local children swarming and laughing in his wake. Thom had the courage to recognise that you have only one life and within it you must be utterly true to yourself.