Farewell to Prague. Desmond Hogan

after that I moved out of the digs into the flat of another friend. He gave me as a gift a white, blue-embroidered Mexican shirt and not satisfied with the gift I took to wearing his clothes, especially a black leather jacket. I would sit in these clothes in Dwyers on Lower Leeson Street. I used to fulminate there – a new identity, a new shirt.

      With change in Dublin you always recourse to the sea. I went every day to Sandycove, the sea at its most azure at Monkstown.

      One night I went to a party held in the open air by the Forty Foot. Eleanor was singing songs and crying ‘My baby. My baby’, referring to a baby aborted in England, child of a ruffian songster.

       In the yellow bracken he laid her down,