‘I’m working on my memoirs, dear Mary Lou, recalling several
memorable days spent with yourself,’
I announced, but as usual didn’t receive an answer.

Bemused, I thought back to the day it all started, 
that day in Dublin waiting for the St Kevin’s Bus,
when we both tra la la lallied to a busker who sang, 
‘I Met My Love On St Stephens Green’.

This turned out to be prophetic, because it was in that lovely Dublin park,
surrounded by images of the glorious uprising of ’16,
that I’d first espied her looking at the statue
of that remarkable writer, Samuel Beckett.

‘I’m trying to work out who he is,’ she said,
pointing at the bust with a puzzled frown,
‘isn’t he the one whose still waiting for God?’

I laughed, ‘I think you mean Godot.’
This interesting lady then announced she was about to complete a long-awaited pilgrimage,
namely to that lovely vale of Glendalough, in the county of Wicklow.
When we stopped in Bray she awoke as from a disturbed dream and,
as a posse of Americans filled our omnibus, hid behind my slender frame.
I wondered what your secret was, Mary Lou – as we peered into St Kevin’s Bed,
the indentation in the cliff inhabited by that ancient hermit,
which towered above the lough’s peat-filled depths
in that lovely valley of the glen with two lakes,
the literal meaning of the valley we’d both escaped to.
But as dawn broke the next day we stood amid the vale’s ruined monastic settlement,
and I listened enraptured as you sang, ‘Hello, lovely birds of prey’,
your silky voice seeming to shake a mist-shrouded round tower,
upon which perched a kestrel and an eagle.
‘Are you talking to yourself?’ I asked.
‘Look!’ she replied, ‘It’s Beaky Pete and his girlfriend Kate The Kestrel,’
pointing at the wide-winged birds, the male of which, she claimed,
was taking a break from the US flag at Dublin’s US embassy.
‘Anyway, we better continue with the purpose of our early morning walk,
which is to make a confession to the home of a monk,
to whom my dreams have compelled me to visit,
located in the ruins of this ancient monastery.’
She then gave voice, ‘Dear venerable spirit, please forgive me for following the ways
of that notorious pagan, Laurie Littlehampton-Knox, although I was brought up a Catholic...’
Just then a strong wind blew and I lost the rest, only to hear, ‘This valley’s like a wind funnel.’
Looking round I saw a funny little chap, who introduced himself as Syracuse The Shepherd.
‘I’m half-Greek you know,’ he announced, ‘I came here after the war
seeking solitude – in fact, the locals say the wind blew me in!

‘By the way, you know that Knox fellah she mentioned?
He was arrested after rumours about  a cult in the mountains of Idaho.’

‘What a funny man,’ I said to Mary Lou, but she’d vanished.

But there were two men with bulging jackets, one muttering in a New York accent,
‘The doc thinks she’s off on another wander’.
‘You see,’ the woman herself whispered to me in the Glenvale Hotel,
where I’d tracked her down, hiding behind a menu,
glancing surreptitiously at a man who was saying
he’d seen a face familiar from a television news item.
I listened with notebook in hand, as she declared,
‘It was cool to be different in those heady days of drug-filled abandon,
surfing along to those all-American Beach Boys, singing ‘Surfin’ USA,’
while openly admiring that great rebel Jimmy Hendrix.
‘Did you know he jammed with those doyens of English folk-rock, Fairport Convention,
not once but twice?

‘Of course,’ was my reply, ‘I told you, I’m a journalist.’

‘Really? Anyway, where was I – yes, I saw them at Knebworth;
me and Bill Clinton hitched there when we were up (or is it down?) at Oxford.

‘But I digress – it’s a bad habit, the doctors reckon I took too much cannabis…’
Only for her to be interrupted by a shout of, ‘There you are!’
from a chap who turned out to be US Presidential Secretary, Larry Letterfull.

‘I got in so much trouble,’ he moaned,  ‘when I lost you at the airport.’

As they walked off I heard him whisper to a serious-looking individual from the CIA,
‘I’m afraid the vice-president’s wife is in the early stages of dementia.’
‘What’s more, Bill – yes, I do mean Clinton –
is anxious she doesn’t blurt out what they got up to 
at some place in England called Knebworth,
listening to those old rockers Led Zeppelin.’

‘But what about that Knox fellow, arrested by the FBI?’

‘Oh, he’s old hat, half the senate were cult followers!’

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Well, as I write this from a secluded hideout,
I am soothed by the voice of Mary Lou, singing ‘Help, help me Rhonda’,
and I mused, ‘It’s a good job I like The Beach Boys.’
I’m content in the knowledge that MI6, who, according to a source
at The Times are being asked by the US to serve me an arrest
warrant for kidnap – would not connect the author
Lou Marie with that woman in my cottage,
who’s known to the locals for talking nonsense while playing with her toys,
and even claims she possesses ‘the gift’.

But she can write brilliantly about Katie
the Kestrel and an eagle called Beaky Pete,
who often flies to the lovely vale of Glendalough,
leaving his post on Uncle Sam’s flag at the US Embassy in Dublin.
There he’s fed by a little Greek who, according to ancient cave drawings,
closely resembles that other mysterious hermit, St Kevin.