Its wings clipped but beautiful still ...

LAST week, through the windows of a TransPennine train in the north of England, I saw sheep grazing the hill slopes.

The following day, disconcertingly, I saw a woolly, black-faced sheep in formaldehyde in a glass case in Leeds Metropolitan Museum. It was the work of Damien Hirst, whose first name disconcerts me too, because when I was young I never met another Damien. It seemed there were no Damiens in Ireland then, and when I went to see a black-and-white film of Father Damien, the Belgian priest of Molokai, I may have been the only Damien in the cinema.

In spite of the shared name, I did not have the vocation to live with the lepers on that remote Hawaiian island, although I was quite holy. My father had named me Damien having read Robert Louis Stevenson’s book, Father Damien. I met my first Damien when I was boarding at Blackrock College, Dublin, and didn’t meet another until I was in Ibiza at the age of 21. In 1978, the movie, Damien: Omen 11 hit the cinemas and now there are Damiens everywhere, including Damiens who install stuffed sheep in tanks of formaldehyde.