The Weaver's Road.

Take the Weavers Road, he says, pointing to an iron gateway between hedges of dark red roses, tumbling over the gates. The way through is a grassy path worn into the centre, billowing blossom on either side. We had bowled down twisty Kerry lanes to get there, burrowing through hedges of scarlet fuschia, purple heather and knotted thorn, white with yarrow. 

A long walk down a stony path, we pass the grassy loop of a fairy fort; my heart beats faster at the view from Dunbeg. I pick up two stones from the earth and drop them, with an invocation to the god of the mountains, into a gap in the Stone-Age walls. I leave a coin as well. Someone else has left a ring as an offering. I’d leave my heart if I thought I’d get it back in one piece. It’s moments like that when I know I’m a pagan, no matter what.

Happy.

Around about this time a year ago, I was sitting the terrace of a small café on a promontory on the Amalfi Coast, looking out across the Bay of Naples to Vesuvius. It was the most beautiful day – warm and balmy, but not sweltering. The sky above was almost cloudless and the sea beyond the terrace was a postcard Mediterranean Blue. The only flaw in the experience was the radio in the café behind me, which was blaring out the usual awful europap, but I managed to tune it out.

Then the DJ had a sudden rush of taste to the head and put on The GooGoo Dolls beautiful song Iris. I put down the book I was reading to listen to the music and as I did so, I realised something. In that moment I was happy. I had no especial reason to be happy – I was on my own, drinking water, reading a book, but there it was, I was happy. I remember thinking, this is what peace is – being happy in a moment for no particular reason and knowing it.

Happiness isn’t a constant state: perhaps that’s the biggest cultural, emotional con-trick played on us all. Happiness is an intermittent thing: the important thing is to experience it when it occurs and not break your heart trying to make your life and the people in it into the impossible state of constant joy.

Sometimes I sleep with the radio on. Because sometimes, especially when the nights are light, I can’t sleep without it. I find the Shipping Forecast strangely soothing and the faint drone of the World Service in the background wafts me slowly off to sleep. It makes for whacky dreams sometimes – last night there was clearly some programme on about vets who moonlight as plumbers, because I dreamed I was hacking a radiator to pieces in a room slowly filling with kittens. I don‘t do drugs, but I do mainline Radio Four.

It's the summer. Apparently. Not that you'd know by the gale force wind currently bending trees all over the place. Out of the side of my eye I can see a line of ruffled birds perched along the brow of the house opposite. A quick gust of wind and they're off, blown away, like a flight of bubbles in a wind machine.

I spent a big chunk of Friday evening at a party in a friend's house in Donegal. The house has this amazing view over the Foyle estuary and out to sea, falling away at your feet, tumbling over a sweep of green fields and bowling right down to the water's edge a few miles away. In the distance you can see Magilligan and Benevenagh, over the sea to the north -- or rather to the north-east. Directions are a bit tricky in my part of Ireland, where you can be in the south even when you are further north than the north. If you see what I mean. Anyway, the house was tiny and the party large, so we sat outside, slowly foundering whilst the sun paled and the moon swelled and the stars came out. If I had a view like that I'd never be inside. Not even on a day like this.

Just exactly what benefit George Galloway thought he would gain from CBB is beyond me. Mega-publicity? Sure. He's been all over the papers, but in a bad way, since he went in. If he thought it was going to make him and his anti-war message more relevant to 'the kids' then god knows he didn't suceed. The under-30 brigades may now know who he is, but they ain't listening to what he's saying. Did he really think that he was going to be allowed long, erudite debates about the legality of the Iraq war? On prime-time entertainment TV? He should have stuck to the slaying of right-wing dragons through US Congressional testimony (easily the best TV of last year) and chinning the Telegraph (glorious). I saw him speak not long ago and live and unadulterated he's electric, but CBB exposed one of the reasons that he is -- his ego and his certainty that he is right. All the time. That never looks good on TV. And then there was that gawd-awful CAR CRASH thing with Rula Lenska and her pussy. Ooo, missus.

Green and Black's chocolate has a number of effects. Firstly there's the intense chocolate buzz, only more so. Secondly, you discover that lots of the other chocolate you used to like eating just doesn't do it for you anymore. Apparently, I've become a chocolate snob. Better than being a chocoholic, I suppose...

I am here now and again.

Summer is a goin' out. An apparently sunny day drenches me to the skin during one of the more extreme outbursts of nature's sense of irony. That'll teach me to wear sandals and a toe-ring in late August.

My neighbour cuts my grass for me, sweet thing that he is. The sun ripens my hanging-basket tomatoes, which were an experiment -- I won't try that again. They fruited profusely, but they taste of nothing. Back to the plastic gro-bags.

Other people's lives are soap operas and I just watch them. I'd like a bit of drama in mine, but the best I can do at the moment is a slowly maturing love affair that has the potential to be a vintage one or might just be corked. Who knows? Perhaps the grape variety is wrong...