Pig's cheek and cabbage helped, and why shouldn't it, seeing my Granny used to say Finn MacCumháil had it for his dinner every day and that's what-made him such a great warrior. So what was good enough for Finn was good enough for me. And, besides, I liked it, and I wish I could lay my hands on some now.

Memory is probably the only real compensation there is for growing old.

I have had an eventful life in many parts of the world and seen many things. Yet as the shadows seem to gather more closely, it is not distant places or famous people which fill my mind, but the scenes and faces remembered from my Irish childhood.

My uncle Jack pedalling to Boland's Mill on the finest Easter Monday morning Ireland has ever seen in 1916;
My father (God rest him for the very good man he was, which I was far too young to appreciate at the time) hurrying me along Wood Quay to the bottom of Winetavern Street, where the Free Staters were shelling the Four Courts with an eighteenpounder gun.

And again to stand on a pile of timber across the river to watch the Custom House burning and knowing Jack had something to do with it. Volunteer Dan Head was killed sniping from the Loop Line and for years after, a tricolour flew over his grave in Kilbarrack. I wonder if it still does.

My father had a great sense of history. Which is why we queued on Cork Hill to pay our respects to the great Michael Collins as he lay in state in the City Hall, which terrified me because I had a fear of death then, much more than I have now when my own time cannot be all that far off. Magnificent he looked and at rest, his life's work well done. Immortality lay on him like a garment and his place in our history for evermore assured.

Across the city on a frostlocked night, again we lined up with hundreds of others to file silently past the mortal remains of the revered Countess, the darling of Dublin's poor, as she too lay in state in the Rotunda Rooms.

It was said the powers that be would not allow any public building to be used for the purpose. If so, we should all feel shame - for this flower of the ascendancy had turned her back on her own birthright for Ireland's sake, serving in the Citizen Army with Connolly and Mallin in 1916 and even changing her religion to identify more closely with a people she had come to love more than her own. Politics, that would be. But ordinary people make up their own minds who should and should not be honoured and they queued uncomplainingly in the cold to look on her austere and aristocratic features for the last time. And they were not dry-eyed.

To Bodenstown we cycled, to put a few wild flowers by the grave of Wolfe Tone. It was the time of the Civil War and soldiers were encamped in a nearby field. My father asked one of them if he was Regular or Irregular and with a big country smile the man answered 'Regular, thanks be to God. No trouble in that department now. Its the stirabout that does it!'

Before then, the Tans had raided my school and also our humble backstreet home, which played havoc with my bowels and maybe shortened the ordeal. But Jack would be long gone, by back lanes and through tenement houses no stranger would ever know of. Even though he could be the hardest of men when necessary, Collins had a great gift for geniality, even to snotty nosed little boys. For all old people he had the greatest respect, as indeed most us did then.

My father once said he held me up to see the funeral of Donovan Rossa, although I could not have been much more than an infant at the time. But my father was Dublin through and through and he had the born Dubliner's need to be always 'in the know'. And, to be fair, he usually was.

I can remember being lifted on his shoulder to see the last of the Black & Tans marching to Westland Row Station, happy as sandboys and us all cheering as if we were really sorry to see the back of them.

Clanwilliam House just around the corner in flames and ambushes on Lower Mount Street, so commonplace that we just blessed ourselves and went on playing in the street, without giving them another thought.

The nightly dull whine of the Crossley tenders, bidding us all to frenzied prayer that they would pass by and terrorize someone else.

Walking in Arthur Grifiith's funeral with the Dublin Typographical Society, which was his and my father's trade union.

Putting my foot through a glass wreath in Glasnevin and getting a very black look from Michael Collins who was giving the Oration at the time.

The shocked horror of the morning they hanged Kevin Barry, whose mother kept a little dairy in Fleet Street where we bought ha'penny squares of gur-cake to help out...and the devastation we all felt when the news came from Beal na Blath that Collins was dead.

Ninety years is a long time. Of bad times and disappointments there were more than enough, but they hardly bother me now. Instead, in the blue swirl of pipesmoke when shadows have fallen on the garden, I find myself remembering only the pleasant things. Like the smell of one of Mammy's stews, the long freewheel from the Scalp into Enniskerry and an evening with a young American naval officer who became President of his country.