Every St Patrick’s Day, a Cork-born writer remembers his childhood, when an ancient family friend would arrive carrying a thatch of sodden shamrock, smelling of pipe tobacco and the previous night’s porter, and expecting a soft boiled egg and buttered soda bread for his breakfast

I remember our old neighbour Sean O Laoghaire sitting at our kitchen table, too big for the chair and folded wrong into it, announcing that St Patrick was a fair man all the same for driving the snakes from Ireland. “But,” he added, his voice wheezing around the half-smoked stump of a rolled cigarette, “it was the two-legged variety he had right to go after. The politicians. They’re the real vipers. If he’d rid us of them, he’d be a fella truly worth parading for.”

“That’d earn even the Devil a sainthood,” my mother said, without missing a beat. She was busy taking up soft boiled eggs from the pot, but even with her back turned I could feel her smile. We always had an egg on St Patrick’s Day. Easter, too. Slices of thickly buttered soda bread stacked on a plate in the centre of the table, and I was on the chair beside Sean, kneeling so that I could feel somewhere close to his size.

I could have been no more than six or seven, because my grandmother was still alive and sitting opposite, and Sean was well into his eighties but still looked capable of taking down oak trees with an axe. Six foot tall and built as wide and square as a shed door, with a big bull’s head feathered in tufts of hair that had somehow retained its muddy colour and a wind-battered face lit by laughing eyes, to me he was like something from a story, the way Long John Silver was, or Gulliver, larger than life for the way he seemed so out of date, a man put together with threshing or cattle rustling or trench warfare in mind.