“Do you know the work of John Hewitt?” I asked my sister, who used to live in Belfast.

”I know The John Hewitt,” she replied, “I used to drin there. You would see people like Martin Lynch and other writers there. It was a place where Thinking people would gather.”

”I was thinking of the poet, not the pub,” I said. “I was looking for one of his poems, the one about Christmas.”

”Did you try putting a line of it into Google?”

”I did, hardly any of his work …