Extract from a handwritten letter from Daniel A. Binchy to Michael Tierney (Dublin)

My Dear Michael,

[matter omitted]

My activities here remind me [matter omitted] of your activities in the Dáil. I imagine we both have the same feelings of arduous futility. Still my superiors seem pleased with me, and I do my best. Lectures are my forte, and nothing I could do would give Joe Walshe greater pleasure. It makes him overlook the fact that I am temperamentally a complete misfit for my job, really nothing like as good as Gerald O'Kelly for example, who feels at his happiest in a morning suit or a Frock. For me the round of social activities is an unceasing torment, I dodge them with increasing unscrupulousness when at all possible, and while I flatter myself that I manage to keep up a brave appearance, my heart is all the time wrung thinking of the number of Plummer's slips I could have verified and checked, during those wasted hours. Even worse is my own entertaining, I don't know whether the dinner to the British Embassy or the St. Patrick's day function (given a week late owing to 'flu) to the Irish Colony was the worse - I'm inclined to think the latter. Fortunately the flat is a dream of beauty, and people spend most of their time admiring it. Germans think it is 'eine typischen irische wohnung'; whereas I doubt if there is anything like it in the whole of Dublin, with its Dun Emer carpets, Hicks furniture, Carrickmacross lace, and pictures (mostly lent by friends) by Lamb, Paul Henry, Jack Yeats, AE and Nathaniel Hone.

[matter omitted]