Half-naked landlady guilty of harassment

A brass compass, the gift of friends, now sits in the window, indicating that I am looking due south over Killiney Bay, towards Wexford, and not due east, towards Wales, as I had thought. This is puzzling, as I no longer comprehend why most of the television programmes I pick up are in Welsh.

The fact that I am south- facing does, however, explain why it is warm in the conservatory. I read an article in there yesterday morning, written by Paul Johnson on the subject of houses he has lived in. He still hankers after a Gothic establishment, though his wife, Marigold, sensibly will not let him indulge himself in this matter. He has all my sympathy.

His predicament set me to thinking of the places I have infested myself, quite often in bad company. I suppose the worst, in terms of stress, was an apartment at Broadway and 89th Street, where my landlady, a nubile creature of about 25, was in the habit of strolling about dressed only in knickers, and would occasionally, in the small hours, ask for an advance on the rent on the grounds that she had run out of anything interesting to smoke.

One neighbour threatened to kill me if I did not stop writing (he could hear the typewriter) as he was certain that such behaviour was intrinsically evil, and another was shot dead by an off-duty cop when he tried to panhandle him for the price of a beer. There is no fairer prospect in New York City than the road to JFK airport. I took it as soon as I could.

Since when I have been variously about the place - freezing garret in Hammersmith, quite pleasant quarters in Kinsale, temporary possession of wooded acres at Glandore (a most pleasing illusion while it lasted) - and now this. And where am I? No more than three miles from where I was born.

I USED to find a confusion of accents in the theatre or cinema irritating, as when English actors, for instance, assumed that attendance at half a dozen movies featuring John Wayne or Marlon Brando qualified them to impersonate anyone from Abraham Lincoln to Marilyn Monroe, or when their American counterparts figured that a cursory study of Maureen O'Hara or Barry Fitzgerald was sufficient to grasp the intricacies of Irish speech.

Disparities in accent no longer bother me, even when combined in one production, as was recently the case when Shivaun O'Casey directed her father's masterpiece, The Plough and the Stars, in Dublin. There was a concatenation of Irish, English and American vowels dropping over the footlights that had so sensuous an effect on me that I left under the impression that I had attended a performance of The Shadow of a Gunman. I believe I referred to this in print, which goes some way towards explaining why I ceased to be a theatre critic about 15 years ago.

Now that the Irish are once again invading Hollywood in vast numbers (it seems to be obligatory for scriptwriters to explain the strangulated delivery of the leading man by intruding a reference to his childhood in Ireland), further glottal shifts seem inevitable.

MERRION ROW, formerly known principally as a traffic jam, has become the Gin Lane of Dublin, bombarded by pop music and populated by street urchins, night-club bouncers, thieves, beggars and ruffians of all description. Among the indigent are a couple of clients of mine whose faces light up when they see me, for they know I am a sucker for civility. (One of them is sleeping rough these days because, as a sub- editor on one of Mr Murdoch's newspapers, he captioned a female study, 'Tits are out, bums are in'.)

Along with the more obvious dangers on this thoroughfare lurk hidden hazards also, as I have been warned by a scholarly acquaintance whom I met last week with his arm in a sling. Having been brought up not to inquire into the misfortunes of others, I did not comment on his injury until eventually he could bear it no longer. 'This,' he said, indicating the arm, 'is a consequence of the liberalisation of Ireland.'

'How so?' I asked politely.

'I was hurrying along Merrion Row,' he said, 'when I slipped' (here he paused for effect) 'on a used condom.'

'Glory be,' said I, 'what are we coming to?'

I bought the poor fellow another whiskey. 'It has almost,' said he, 'restored my faith in the Catholic Church.'