You picked a fine time to leave us, Mihail*

This may be the only picture you'll ever see on Blipfoto of my father. He was the one who let me get away with it all, but he got away from us all in 1974, and I've only seen him once since. I found the photo whilst sorting through piles of papers and photos in my mother's former bedroom. She's moving out of her house.

I honestly think he is, or was, Not Quite Right (in the head, though whether it is ever right to leave a young wife and six children is another matter). The fact that he is depicted wearing a Mexican sarape while holding a penny whistle in conservative South Dublin seems to bear this out. The photo was taken some time in the early 1970s outside our family home in Foxrock. My mother must have been in her oil painting phase, as the conservatory seems to have been set up as a studio. The smell of turps was gorgeous! I used to go and sun myself on the steps there, which connected to my father's study window, and write poetry. I had a phase of writing religious poems, and graffitti-ing the bathroom walls with prayers...I also liked the smell of the back of the television set, which could be sampled from the stairs. I would have been about eight at the time. I suppose.

My father and mother married in 1959, and settled in Dublin, on my father's wish. As soon as his mother died, around nine years later, he began spending longer and longer periods in Mexico, eventually returning only every couple of years. My mother was a good Catholic, and kept on producing babies. She might have had twice as many, had he been around more often. Her last child, my sister M, was born in 1972. It is almost certain that my father had more children and common-law wives in Mexico. In 1973 my mother went to Mexico to find him and discuss the possiblity of divorce, and the oil crisis (the house was getting expensive to heat) but he fobbed her off, and she returned depressed, after nine weeks of travelling the length and breadth of Mexico, in which she'd only managed to converse with him for one evening. A kindly man, one John Brothers, of Hartford, Ohio, befriended her, and persuaded her to return to her family and stop pursuing the impossible. I owe him my sincere gratitude, though we have never met. He continued to telephone and check on her welfare for several years, and I believe he may have saved her from taking action that she or her children might have had cause to regret.

My father turned 40 in 1970 (I remember that birthday) so here he would be 40-plus. Whoever took the photo wasn't especially accomplished, but it's one of the few photos we've got of him in a recognisable setting. The house, Knocksinna, has now been flattened, and all that remains is the name of a new housing development. It was my first home, and to be honest, I miss the memory of that place more than I now miss my father. Bricks and mortar may be knocked down, but they don't walk away.

* My father was christened Michael, but has also been known as Miguel, Miguel Angel, and various other names. In this pic I've called him Mihail as it's the Irish version of his name. Michael was always interested in languages, and quizzed me about the Irish lessons at my school. Love of languages was one of the qualities we shared.