In October 2004, I went down to the Boole Library in Cork to see for the first time if there was work I could usefully do to give some background to what seemed to me the more important boxes of Keery Papers, possibly making them more accessible to researchers.

While there, I bought a sketchbook, with a distinctive hardback cover, in the Students’ Union Shop. I thought it would make a good notebook in which to record my archive initiative. Over time, that notebook has become a valuable “work in progress notebook”. Its occasional entries provide a useful record of my various writing and other creative efforts.

The entry for 24 October 2005 states baldly in its final sentence that: “the new idea that has come to me is to start on an autobiographical process entirely based on my study and the materials in it”.

The working method I devised was to try to produce a complete description of the contents of my study, working from left to right around the walls, looking particularly at the books, files and boxes on my shelves, giving short accounts of how and why they had found their way there.

I managed to complete this exercise by 31 January 2007, ending up with a text of 319 pages under the title M.A.D.. A one-page introduction explains that the title is intended to catch the eye and to carry a coded description of the content, which is, after all, both a memoir and a diary, produced like the “Making of a Documentary”. The title is also a reminder of my life in Brussels, which was subject to “the MAD”, a weekly supplement, “Magazine des Arts et Divertissements”, published every Wednesday by the Brussels newspaper, “Le Soir”.

To give the flavour of M.A.D., I include below an early page from the 319 page manuscript. It gives some information that may help to further fill out some background to this chronological narrative. The brief outline picture of our family in the extract can now be completed by recording the arrival of a second grandchild, Emer Anne Abena Keery, born to Amma and Justin on 25 April 2006.

“Hanging on a nail over the door as you come into the study from the landing is a ready-made photograph frame and the picture in it was taken by our son Justin, using an automatic shutter release, on Christmas day 2001.

Thanks to the automatic timing the photograph includes the photographer so it shows my immediate family with only one notable absentee. Five smiling adults are showing off an almost obscenely colourful display of wrapped Christmas presents, which fills the fireplace of a brightly decorated room. I am standing to the right behind Anne who is kneeling on the floor. Our daughter, Patricia, is sitting opposite Anne, her back against a tartan-covered armchair. Justin is sitting behind Patricia on the arm of the chair with his arm behind his partner, Amma Kyei-Mensah.

The missing member of the family is our grandson, Eli Yao Keery, born to Amma and Justin on 9 November 2000 and sleeping upstairs in the house rented to accommodate his parents and himself for their Christmas holiday visit to Dublin.

As I am now writing at the end of October 2005, let me simply record that when the picture was taken I was 62, Anne was 65, Justin was 33 and Patricia was 30.

Happily no great calculation or research was needed to call up those ages. An important and very simple planning tool I keep in the sheaf of priority notes always to hand on my desk is a dog-eared sheet showing the ages of each direct family member on an annual basis, an exercise drawn up in 1984 and running as far as 2013, the last year I could fit on the paper. This invaluable sheaf of notes is always easy to find. It is currently identified by the large plastic spring clip, in the shape of a grand piano, holding it together, probably the property of Patricia, the pianist in the family.

Hanging on another small nail below the light switch on a narrow angled piece of wall to the left as you come into the study is a slim one-month-per-page wall calendar. It is the Quaker Tapestry Peace Calendar 2005. I bought one for the first time last year and I have already placed my order for the 2006 calendar as the design fits the space so well. The calendars are a spin-off from the hugely successful effort to create something like the famous Bayeux tapestry to celebrate the 350-year history of the Quaker movement.

The largest picture in the room hangs on the left wall of the corner into which I fitted one end of my desk. I can look up at it above the slim flat screen which displays my computer work.

It is framed substantially in a square glazed box made for it originally by the Dawson Gallery in plain light wood with a silver gilt surround. This sets off the abstract minimalism of the picture, a screen-print made by Patrick Scott, one of Ireland’s best-known modernists. The overlapping curves of green and yellow on a plain canvas are typical of one of his stylistic periods.

Thinking it might be worth something today, it was one of a few pictures I offered a Dublin art auctioneer on our return from Brussels as we have so little space to hang things here. He wasn’t interested and the history of the print and its acquisition by me probably justifies his reticence.”

If you want to read the whole manuscript you will have to go to the Keery Papers in the Boole Library in Cork. For now, readers will have to imagine everything on the walls and bookshelves of my study as telling some kind of story.

Read more: 2006 – Travel and Time