Eventually I revealed myself and handcuffed myself to the desks

Eventually I revealed myself and handcuffed myself to the desks. But the president lost his nerve and called in the coppers.”The Diaries begin in 1970, when O’Connor gave up the Irish Bar to write full-time. He was 40, well-off, able to sustain life without a proper job. “I was living in the family home with a housekeeper and the old nanny, I was writing a sports column for the Sunday Mirror, I was putting on one-man shows at the Abbey and touring them very cheaply because you had only to pay yourself and the man doing the lighting.”I used a lot of Odyssean cunning to survive as an artist without surrendering to a job.

And from 1966, I had an income from the States because I’d been on The Johnny Carson Show and an impresario called Johnny Cadick booked me to appear at 50 ladies’ clubs. Doing that gave me enough money to live in New York for four months.”He settled in the Chelsea Hotel, behind the memorial plaques to Behan and Dylan Thomas. “I had no arri?-pens?about the Chelsea,” said O’Connor in his airy way. “I thought it had something to do with the Chelsea Flower Show.” But he found himself hanging out with Viva Superstar from Warhol’s Factory, and Gregory Corso and other Sixties literary flotsam “I was hooked,” he says fondly. “I was thrown into the whole American explosion – New York had the best abstract painting, the modern poetry explosion, Kerouac and the Beats – and I had all the fallout of the Vietnam War The streets were filled with marching protesters A million people on Boston Common Lawyers and priests going to jail. I had it all for years, courtesy of these blue-rinsed ladies on the ladies’-club circuit…”Back in Dublin, between these heady excursions, O’Connor started to drink alcohol.

Weird, eh? How could this raffish house-party animal, Behan fan and bookish Dubliner possibly not take a drink until he was 40? “I was too much of a sportsman,” he said with a note of defensiveness “I’d be out with my weights, my pole-vaulting, my rugby. But when I gave up sport at 28, I looked around Dublin and saw the state of the two professions I was involved in. In the law, there was a high percentage of alcoholics who’d appear, wig askew, in court – you’d see a brilliant mind slaughtered by alcohol in front of a judge. And the literary profession was probably the most alcoholic in western Europe; Paddy Kavanagh was dying of drink, Behan was dying of it, Myles na Gopaleen was dying of it – and those were just the major ones.