'Of the many unhappy experiences of my boyhood - French kissing an earwig that had crawled into my harmonica immediately springs to mind - none have stayed with me more vividly than the night I woke up to find I was sharing a pillow with four mice. Even now I sometimes close my eyes and find the scene painted on the inside of my yelids. The thought of sharing a cottange, never mind a bed, with a rat was my worst fear realized.'

'I ran out screaming into the night, jumped into the car and frantically tried to insert the house key into the ignition. I was going back home. Of course I was going back. But to what? Ritual humiliation? "Back already, darling? I wasn't expecting you until next week. I'll put the kettle on." My senses started to unscramble. I coaxed myself back indoors. Everything looks better in the fresh light of a new dawn, even rats and 1950s furniture. Of course I was staying.'



'I had a fitful night and woke early. Thin shafts of sunlight speared through the window grime. I threw some water on my face and stepped outside. The storm of the previous night had abated. An army had been up all night polishing the countryside. The pine trees in the garden were gleaming, the air was freshly laundered and seemed to magnify life itself. Over the crest of hill by the cottage I could just see the top third of Muckish, a black and smooth table mountain that dominated an otherwise gentle landscape. It looked alien, as if some supernatural force had left it there by mistake. A scattering of clouds so white they could have been boiled floated across the azure sky.'

'This was more like it.'

'I set off for the village greatly cheered. It never ceases to amaze me how much a splash of sunshine lifts the spirits and helps buff up the most unpromising of buildings. I passed a tatty, abandoned petrol station, which looked as alluring as an Edward Hopper painting. Not even Hopper could have made much of the farm supplies warehouse across the street but, farther on, the Red Roof Restaurant and Par Three Golf Course had the inviting air of the Old Course at St Andrews on the first morning of the Open Championship.'

'The road narrowed and curved left. In the distance I could see the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean bathed in godly white light, like Brigadoon after global warming. The landscape rolled toward me for miles in a patchwork of greens and browns until finally it came to rest at my feet. I stood there for ten minutes with a single thought in my head: "It's a film set."

'The rural Irish landscape often has this effect on visitors, especially from Hollywood. A splash of sea, forty shades of green, the white homestead, the priestly collar, the village pub. Before you know it Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are dressed in peasant rags, playing out a torrid love affair in ridiculous accents even the deaf would recognize as Scottish. If you ask me Hollywood's version of Ireland is always ridiculous. If the John Wayne of The Quiet Man came back from America tomorrow he'd be selling mobile phones in Dublin for a living and settling his arguments over women with a flick knife.'

'But, trust me, the view from Creeslough really was like a film set.'

'I snapped out of my trance. There was work to be done. I needed food, coal, a new mattress, a box of J-clothes, disinfectant and an elephant gun) or failing that, three hundredweight of rat poison).'

No News at Throat Lake, Lawrence Donegan