The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were mobbed when they came to play Dublin; the comics we read – The Victor, Hotspur, Hornet – were filled with the heroic exploits of British soldiers fighting the Huns and Japs. I was taken to see the film The Battle of Britain and sat cheering with hundreds of other Dublin schoolboys as the RAF drove the Luftwaffe from the skies over Kent. And one memorable night at the end of the decade British television arrived. Suddenly we had Blue Peter and Jackanory and Top of the Pops and Coronation Street.

The alien accents became part of our daily life; the cultural separation between my world and that of a child living in London or Manchester was increasingly blurred. We cheered for England in World Cup football (this was long before an Englishman, Jack Charlton, brought an Irish side to the competition) and the teams we supported were British. I was a Man United fanatic along with half the population of the country. English tabloid newspapers were also starting to enjoy widespread circulation in urban areas: my first memory of a newspaper front page is of walking into a neighbour’s kitchen when I was about nine and seeing a copy of the News of the World. It carried a banner headline announcing that an actress named Sharon Tate had been brutally murdered in Los Angeles.I visited Britain twice as a child Of that first journey I have only the vaguest of memories.

Late night on a train travelling down to London from the Welsh coast A family sitting opposite us with children the same age. Their father spoke with an Irish accent but the kids were English I remember being confused by that How could you be Irish and English, I asked my mother. I don’t remember her answer, but I do remember the names of stations – Crewe, Rugby, Chester – crackling on the Tannoy and the great noise of the city when we got off the train in London. I remember men with black faces, men with turbans, red buses and black taxis, and an Indian takeaway eaten on the floor of a guesthouse on Ebury Street That was London in 1968.

It was bigger and noisier than anywhere I’d ever been before and it frightened me.I came again when I was a teenager, this time with a company from the Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland. We were camping in Chingford in Essex, but we made for the West End of London whenever we could. I remember that there were Girl Guides from the north of England on the trip. They were the same age as us, but seemed light years more sophisticated We kept our distance On that trip I discovered pornography and French letters. The former I contemplated in nervous astonishment, the latter I had no use for, but still kept one in my pocket for months afterwards. On our way back to Ireland we hid magazines and condoms in our rucksacks.