Most of us are interested in other people – the pattern of their lives, the dramatis personae of their personal histories; and for many of us, what we grow up with is just our ‘normal’. It isn’t until we start to be aware of the lives of others around us that we can see our own lives in some kind of perspective. That’s certainly how it was for me: I got to the age of ten before it dawned on me that my home life was unusual. For a start, growing up in the sixties in middle-cla

There's BC, and there's AD; and then there's BA. Before Achill. In the early '60s, before we were permanently bewitched - or enchanted perhaps - by Achill, our family used to holiday on the coast of Kent, at Littlestone on Sea. Littlestone was neither town nor village, more an amorphous conurbation with no centre to it, nor any kind of infrastructure. A kind of civic invertebrate. This area of the Kent coast showed all the symptoms of post-war seaside decline - deteriorating

This evening I am on a boat crossing the Irish Sea from Dublin to Liverpool. Suddenly I am five. I am with my mother and my sister on an ancient freight ship: none of your Ro-Ro ferries in 1967. Just a rusting heap of beige metal, cars craned up onto the storage areas, non-commercial passengers a necessary evil on a vessel that crosses daily to a land still blighted by inequality and poverty, accumulated over centuries of English mismanagement. Our mother had seen a private a