By mid-February I knew that I should be able to get a first version of this chronological collection of texts completed for my 70th birthday family get-together in May.

On Shrove Tuesday I went to the celebration of the poet John Montague’s 80th birthday organised by Poetry Ireland and held in the fine St. Stephen’s Green building of the Royal College of Surgeons. As I sat listening to the introduction and readings, and looked around the hall at the assembled establishment of Irish letters, I felt warmed by my footnote status in such company.

There were people like Michael Longley, who I had known since student days. There was Dardis Clarke, who recently completed a new collection of his father’s (Austin Clarke) poetry, and who I first met in Dublin’s Press and Publications Branch of the National Union of Journalists.

Theo Dorgan was the Director of Poetry Ireland when I came back to Dublin on retirement and talked about the future of the Poetry Ireland Library. Joe Woods, the current Director, who introduced the evening, is the editor who, amazingly, thought to include one of my poems in the 2007 anthology of contemporary Irish poetry, “Our Shared Japan”.

Dennis O’Driscoll, Maurice Harmon and Tony Curtis I had met in the company of the late Robert Greacen. Rosemarie Rowley, another former European official who had retired back to Dublin ahead of me, was also there – she has published a couple of collections of verse powered strongly by personal emotion and feminist conviction.

Apart from the writers, there were of course publishers, editors, promoters, students and enthusiasts from many parts of the country at the Montague birthday event.

I was particularly pleased when John Fitzgerald spoke to me – to my shame I did not recognise him. He is the Librarian of University College Cork and, in that capacity, is the formal custodian of the Keery Papers in the College’s Boole Library Archive. When he asked about my poetry, I was glad to be able to tell him that my current preoccupation was with this memoir text and that I hoped that in May I would be in touch with the Boole to give the archive the first copy outside the family circle.

The family celebration at which I first circulated a draft of this text went extremely well. There was also the exhilaration of working with the citizens’ campaign so ably organised by Brendan Halligan to help ensure a Yes vote in the second Lisbon referendum.

There was then sadness and preoccupation brought towards the year’s end by the death of my friend Kenneth Armstrong and news of the illnesses of Brian Lenihan Jnr., Minister for Finance, and my close friend and painting companion, Hugh Brady. Hugh’s illness proved terminal – as did Brian Lenihan’s – and he was a deeply-felt loss at the end of the year.

Read more: 2010 – Happy Days