Seamus Heaney and the dullness of “Grey Cement”…
One wintery evening in the early 1970s, a RTE film crew arrived at my boarding school, St Columb’s College on Bishop Street in Derry, to make a TV documentary. It was rare excitement in the boredom and routine that defined the boarders’ lives. The subject of the documentary was an ex-boarder, the poet Seamus Heaney. One scene involved an actor – or perhaps it was the poet himself –sneaking down the wrought-iron fire-escape attached to the grey-stoned gable of Senior …