This is a corner of the attic room of our house in Dublin. In the down-slope of the ceiling on the other side there's a second skylight, much wider and longer and lower than the one in the picture, and through it I have a high clear view of Dublin Bay and Howth Head and the Dublin port shipping coming and going - or not, depending on the weather.

The desk surface is a slab of board on two filing cabinets, but when we first moved in 30 years ago, it consisted of two planks that had served as bench seats in a lecture hall in Carysfort College - oak whose grain had been polished by the soft shiftings of a century of student schoolmistresses.

I liked to think there was much virtuous concentration stored in that timber, but I also liked the makeshift nature of the arrangement. I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded. Even so, the attic was redesigned 10 years ago, with the new skylights and a mini-stack arrangement to create some badly needed book space.

When I'm at the desk, I'm supervised on my right by a yellow bittern in its glass case and a framed poster announcing a 1973 Faber reading by Auden, Spender, Hughes and myself - a reading that turned into a memorial after Auden's sudden death. (A photo on the shelf shows the then three survivors on stage on the night.)

Behind me, on the wall to my right, there's a John B Yeats drawing of WB at a séance - a gift from Frank McGuinness - and another poster of a friend's mother in her 1950s heyday as the potato queen of North Dakota.

The 13-volume OED was presented to me by my Carysfort colleagues when I left in 1981, the rubber stout bottle on the front of the desk by my son Christopher, and the silver whisky measure beside it - "just a thimbleful" - by my good friend Matthew Evans. I could go on.