It had been a major omission on my part not to get organised to visit the United States in my student or political days. Anne had been, just after she completed her university studies. When we took Justin and Patricia to see New York and Washington in April 1983 I realised that for educated English speakers America really is a land of enormous potential. Though so far away, it is also familiar, thanks to the huge output of Hollywood and the realism of so much contemporary American writing.

Among the incentives to travel this year were the children’s interest in seeing two great cities, the cheap flights from Brussels offered by Capital airlines, the feeling that contact should be made with cousin Bill, and the possibility of stopping off at Princeton on the drive from New York to Washington, thanks to an invitation from a student called John Gutman, who I had befriended in Quaker House at the end of 1981.

We all loved the trip, even if the long uncomfortable flights in economy class seemed to do lasting damage to my back.

Our hotels and the hired automatic Oldsmobile were an adventure. For security we all slept in the same room at the Paramount on 42nd Street in New York. What a fright we got, and what a laugh we had, when the venetian blind fell down one night with a great crash. The drive out of the city, through the heavy traffic and tunnels, along streets where the gratings steamed as in the movies, was so nerve-shattering I had to pull off the road at the first opportunity in Newark to try to calm down. At Princeton we had the luxury of staying in John Gutman’s parents’ house – both were academics and theirs was a comfortable and stylish American home. We took John and his sister for a Chinese meal and had our first fortune cookies.

In Washington, on the Jonietz’s advice, we stayed in a Best Western at Rosslyn so that we could use the metro to get around the capital. Cousin Bill and his wife Marge were welcoming, as was Denis Corboy, the Head of Information at the European Commission’s Washington Delegation. We were impressed by our visits to the Capitol and the National Gallery, but the place that impressed us most was the shopping mall at Tyson’s Corner. Subsequent trips to the States would confirm that the Keerys are shopping mall people.

While the US trip was both trailblazing, and the experience of the year, there was exceptional travel both before and after that trip. Dick Burke’s responsibility for the Greek Memorandum offered missions to Athens. There was an interesting weekend trip to the World War I battle sites, particularly to the terrible Vimy Ridge.

Here the Canadians suffered most. Separated by a huge crater from the Germans, they tunnelled down into the chalk where the horrors were such that they left a chalk bulkhead to screen fresh troops from the sight of the dead and wounded they were replacing. This awed us all, as did a subsequent weekend in Berlin where we travelled by U-Bahn into the East, witnessed the poverty of the Communist version of the city’s consumer society, and saw why a wall protected by a no man’s land of mines and barbed wire was thought necessary to separate whole populations.

After the previous year’s success with the film course at the cinema museum, I decided I would like to try to find an evening course at which I could learn oil painting.

By the time I got organised in October most courses had already begun. The most interesting and accessible venue seemed to be the Academie des Beaux Arts in the Rue de Midi. When I took the metro down there one lunchtime to pursue my inquiries I found a fascinating collection of ill-matched old and new buildings which nevertheless managed to project a serious art-school image through its untidy posters and dusty plaster casts.

The high-ceilinged studios in which sculpture and painting were taught looked and smelt as if they had been encrusted and impregnated with the paint and chippings left by generations of aspiring artists which, of course, they had. As enrolment for the year had already been completed, the clerk in the academy office suggested that if I decided to pursue my inquiries I should come down one evening at 6 o’clock, at the start of the two-hour session, and ask the teacher of the painting course if he would be prepared to admit me.

I duly presented myself some evenings later and introduced myself to Mr De Moor, a friendly bearded man a good deal younger than myself, who was presiding over a large studio where a thin nude model was reclining in an odd pose on an artificially draped and furnished podium. At easels spread around the room an ill-assorted group of about eight men and women, looking experienced and accomplished, were working on highly-personalised paintings of the scene before them. I immediately felt at home and hoped to be able to talk my way into the class.

Mr De Moor asked me what I did and what I hoped to achieve from the class. I outlined my background, told him I had drawn and painted a bit, but only in water colours and poster paint, and that I now wanted an introduction to oil painting. He appeared sympathetic but said I would have to come back to see him again with my portfolio. While I doubted that a collection of the few sketches and pictures I had done over the years, and still kept somewhere in the cave, would amount to “a portfolio”, I told him I would put together what I had and come to see him again.

The portfolio I ended up with seemed sparse. The largest work was a set of “July 1979” pen-and-wash drawings. There were a number of other pen-and-wash drawings from our Monkstown days and a very few drawings from the first summer in Avenue du Monoplan, sketches focussing on the patterns created by French windows, blinds, sun umbrella and chairs.

Happily Mr De Moor judged that the portfolio showed sufficient evidence of interest and composition to justify his offering me a place in a corner of the studio where he could help to get me started. He made out a list of the materials I would require, including a starting range of colours, and suggested addresses where I might purchase them, including a workshop where, if I decided to set up an easel at home, I might be able to get one direct from the manufacturer. When returning for my first class I was also to bring with me something which could be set up as a simple still life for my first painting exercise.

Even though I often arrived for the classes late and tired from the Commission, I enjoyed almost every evening of the three terms I spent with Mr De Moor at the Royal Academy. When I stopped going it was because I seemed to have less and less time and had neither the skill nor the patience to move into the mainstream of the class, painting a succession of models.

Having learnt the basics of preparation and cleaning-up, I felt confident that I could gradually realise my oil-painting ambitions through experimenting on my own in the cave at home. I was allowed show one canvas in the end-of-year exhibition for the last year in which I participated and exhibited the main canvas on which I had experimented in the basement at home. This was a composition of trees set out in pre-drawn rectangles. Each tree was a different colour against a contrasting sky and ground, with the horizon between earth and sky providing a link along each line of trees.

The idea for this picture had come to me for purely pragmatic reasons. I had asked myself what could I do which would allow me to advance through manageable sections, providing also an opportunity to experiment with the oil-paint colours and textures. Given the difficulty of brushwork and the patience required to allow for the drying of successive layers of paint, I had decided to try working exclusively with palette knives and to manage each section in a way that would permit me to run one area of wet paint right up to another without too much risk of mixing or blurring.

I started out painting in the middle of the canvas-textured paper, beginning with a white tree – or rather a white foliage shape balancing on a small black trunk – and set against a grey sky and darker ground. As I moved out into the other squares I saw the trees presenting a four part composition in which blue, red, green, and yellow corners would be divided by a neutral cross emerging through the rectangles.

I consulted Mr De Moor as the work was in progress and he warned me that I might have to do a lot of re-painting to get the colour composition right as the rectangles neared completion. With all the rectangles finished, I had to re-paint only two to get the picture finished to my satisfaction.

Like anything I have ever done, I can point to mistakes I made in the execution, but nevertheless this first oil-painting that I could call wholly my own is probably the best and most satisfying I have ever done. It is certainly almost universally admired with occasional guests offering to buy it, should I ever wish to get rid of it, and with a photo of it occupying a pin-up place in Justin’s London kitchen for a number of years. Should I ever find myself publishing poems or memoirs in a format with a colour cover presentation I hope to use the tree picture as the main cover illustration.

Painting as a pastime, when the subject is going well, is one of the most exciting things I know. It absorbs you completely with such an intensity that you are oblivious to the time involved. Some of the satisfaction undoubtedly comes from the rituals of preparation and cleaning up I learnt at the Academy from Mr De Moor, disciplines on which most painting manuals rightly insist. The mind seems to settle and focus as you put on your overalls and prepare the palette with linseed oil. When your painting session ends, the palette has to be cleaned again or steps taken to protect the unused paint. Knives or brushes should be wiped or washed clean with great care.

Thanks to Mr De Moor, our household is never without the “black soap” which, after brushes have been rinsed in turpentine, seems almost magically to clean bristles of oil and pigment as they are bathed under a cold tap. I still don’t know why such a powerful cleaner with the colour and texture of old golden syrup should be called black soap.

Read more: 1984 – Illness and Star Trek