Almost exactly three years ago I went to Brussels for a few days. On one of those days I went out to the Waterloo battlefield. I’m not sure I can recommend the place for a swift bout of midwinter tourism – unless the battle has had a grip on your imagination for years and years, that is.

Don’t tell anyone, but I like poetry. Nothing too hifalutin, mind. My introduction to the finer aspects of English literature came by way of forthright, uncomplicated men whose method of teaching poetic appreciation was to make us memorise the poem and to hit us when we didn’t.

I see that the Ockham Book Awards in New Zealand have dropped two titles from contention because AI was used in the cover illustration. This caught my eye because we’ve just reissued all the Dirty Shirt books with new covers and our search for an artist was the first time I’d come face to face with the bottomless sink that is AI illustration.

When my past becomes too vague and distant for memory to grasp it reliably, I feel that the term ‘personal history’ doesn’t really apply. What follows is what I’d call personal archaeology. This is where a whole package of memory is dependent on a thing – some surviving artifact that might be the only proof I’m not making it all up.

One evening, as I was strolling towards the Munster lines, I met one of them, slightly intoxicated, making for our barracks. He had the fixed eye and smiling mouth of an Irishman with a purpose. I stopped him. ‘What cheer, Dirty Shirt. Where are you going?’