The year I read Animal Farm.

The last thing I did that year was to read Animal Farm. There was nothing significant about it; the novel just happened to be at hand on that hot, close, steamy new year's eve. I finished it in a couple of hours, sweating on a stool propped up against a bench in the backyard art studio my father had built.

The 'studio' was a neat white cube with a raked roof and windows to the north and west to catch the day and early evening sun. Inside, on a bench running the length of the room was a mess of paint tubes, brushes in old jars, palettes thick with hardened paint, bottles of thinners, oils and sealers; and paintings - finished, unfinished and barely started. The smell of a working art studio is bewitching. I sat amidst the linseedy redolence, switched on the downlight over the bench and opened the book. Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night .... Some notes from an Emerson, Lake and Palmer track detached themselves from the radio on the shelf behind me and hung in the hot air.

Eleven o'clock. I read. "Bravery is not enough," said Squealer. "Loyalty and odedience are more important." Midnight. My much younger siblings burst out of the house followed by my mother, all armed with pots and pans, and clattered down the driveway toward the street. I read. In April, Animal Farm was proclaimed a Republic, and it became necessary to elect a President. There was only one candidate .... I finished the book half an hour later and went to bed. That was it for 1972.

The year had started a lifetime earlier. At the end of the previous year I had left home, left family, left the State, left the drugs. I had travelled with a cousin to the other side of the country for six weeks, two thousand miles away, and when I had returned in the second month of 1972 life was suddenly like a long wide beach washed clean by a king wave, leaving smooth sand sparkling in the sun.

Of course there had been nothing unusual about it. It was part of the post-1960s culture. Sending your children as well as yourself to psychiatry clinics was just another social affectation, a hyper-hippy adjunct, a discussion point at inner urban dinner parties where politics, sex and religion had talked themselves dry. People needed another taboo topic to oil with alcohol.How's junior doing? Quite well. Dr. Zeinstug has brought out his/her inner id and has sequentially fired his/her emotional endpoints. And the pills are working. I really recommend Dr. Zeinstug. Or was it Dr. Zugstein? That riesling has quite gone to my head.

The worst part of it, of course, had been the unintended consequence of having to find an excuse, on returning to school, for have been away on appointment mornings with thirty pairs of eyes staring as you entered the classroom. I had an appointment. What's wrong? Oh, nothing really. Just a check-up. But you have them every month. How do you explain Rorschach tests to a fellow thirteen-year-old?

I still visit the old house. The art studio stands empty now except for dust and junk and its west window is louvre-less; and cold wind blows rain in and no sun enters any more because the garden is an overgrown jungle. Then I go into the house where my main task is to make sure she takes the pills that keep her alive. Ten of each, every morning and every night, all sizes and colours, like a 1960s psychedelic candy-coated dream.