Mr Cathal Ó Flaithbheartach is eighty-four and six foot three. His hair is wispy and silvery, his complexion ruddy and freckly, his nose aquiline and bulbous, his spectacles round and horn-rimmed. He and his wife Judith, a jolly little teapot-shaped lady with a waddle like that of a pigeon, live in a converted eighteenth-century farmhouse close to a thicket of alders on a bend in the river on an area of flatter ground at the base of the hill on which our village is built.

Mr Ó Flaithbheartach is an artist. He has held a lifelong passion for the activity, having started to draw when he was a child. (Come to think of it, that’s when most people start to draw, but Mr Ó Flaithbheartach was particularly keen.) He used to be an auctioneer and painted on his days off. Now he pursues his hobby full-time. His studio is his loft, which he himself spent the first three months of his retirement modifying. It still contains his collection of illuminated manuscripts, but the cases they are displayed in have been moved closer together and into a corner.

The rest of the loft, which Mr Ó Flaithbheartach has fitted with extra windows, is devoted to art. It resembles many an artist’s studio, yet, while it is neither spectacularly clean and tidy, nor unusually cluttered up with materials (it is orderly, though no more so than one would expect of a room owned by someone accustomed to replacing things neatly after using them), there is something out of the ordinary about it.

Even if you saw the six canvases, on six easels, spaced equidistantly in a row at one end of the atelier, you would probably still be unable to guess what was so novel about the arrangement. You might, not unnaturally, conclude that Mr Ó Flaithbheartach taught evening classes. This is almost true, for he is one of those who used to run courses at Celia Allan’s. I haven’t told you about them, have I? I will, later. He gave practical tutorials on watercolour painting, charcoal sketching and pewter engraving, as well as introductions to numerous aspects of the history of art. These were fascinating lectures, even if their titles, such as ‘A Titian! A Titian! We all fall down!’, ‘A Vermeer of Sophistication’ and ‘Painting the Fauve Bridge’, evinced an apparently incurable weakness for atrocious wordplay.