It’s around two in the morning and I can’t sleep. I go to my study and think about switching on the computer, but instead raise the blinds and look out at the night garden.

Lately, I’ve felt that the fictional stories I write and my real life stories are running together. It’s not that I don’t know which is which, but more that I’m not sure where the most truth lies.

For example, at the moment I’m writing a chapter of “Subbuteo for the Soul”, set in September 1977. Shedders and I were in Ireland, for the first time. He spent a week exploring his family routes while I spent some time in Dublin before hitching west to meet up with him in Killarney.

I know the bones of what happened because I have a diary from 1977, and this particular scene took place in Cork, after Sheds and I had parted again, to make our respective ways home.

I’d taken over seven hours to hitch-hike 40 miles, and realised I’d have to spend the night there. Up till then, I’d been mostly camping but it was late and I didn’t know if there was even a campsite around.

Things of course were different in the 70s, and things are different when you’re in your early twenties. So it was that in my green boots, beard, long hair and lumberjack shirt, I went into a little pub and started talking to the regulars there.

I can’t of course remember, and probably didn’t know anyway, what they really thought of me. But I think they liked something in my sense of adventure. Perhaps they could tell I was genuinely open to Irish culture, even if I couldn’t possibly understand it in a two week visit. I might even have told them about the Irishman who gave me a lift and who’d talked passionately about the Potato Famine. In my ignorance, I’d assumed it must have happened during his lifetime, so vividly did he recall the injustice of what the English had done to the Irish. But of course, it took place in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Cork locals bought me drinks but when I said I had nowhere to stay the night, no one offered to take me home with them. But they did have another suggestion to make . . .

I sit here now, watching the swaying trees in the London night, and my thoughts try to arc back, bypassing 35 years of jobs and relationships and movies watched and holidays and dozens of novels written . . .

“You could stay at the old school,” says one of the locals. I’m feeling a little unsteady from the Guinness but I swear his mates are smiling oddly, like they do at the start of a horror movie.

But instead of grabbing my rucksack and taking my chances on the streets of Cork, I do exactly what the outsider dupe in the movies does and say, “Sounds great. Where is it?”

Then the pub’s closed and I’m walking up an unlit lane in the midnight dark. The road curves around to the right then opens up into a wide expanse of tarmac in front of a huge Gothic-looking building that’s utterly dark.

I go to the front door of the school and knock but really don’t expect anyone to respond.

Yet the door opens, weak yellow light falling out into the yard.

“Hello,” says a tiny girl, maybe eight years old. Dimly, I wonder why she isn’t in bed.

“Sorry to bother you,” I say. “But is there anywhere for me to stay around here?”

She points behind me. “The old school room’s open. You can sleep there.”

I thank her and head over to a one-room building, its windows sheening faint silver in the moonlight. It’s not locked and I go inside. I can’t find a light switch but can see enough by the moon to appreciate that I’m in a Victorian kind of room: long wooden benches, a standalone blackboard, high teacher’s desk at the front.

I get out my sleeping bag and lay it on one of the benches. I’m tired so despite the strangeness of my surroundings, I fall asleep quickly. I’m not sure if I’m dreaming or half-awake and hearing reality but for some time there are strange muffled sounds from outside, soft scratchings, faint cooings . . .

I don’t know what time it is, but a couple of hours later, I fully wake and sit up.

Just inside the doorway stands a man in a glowing white suit. He doesn’t have a coat or any luggage with him.

He speaks to me but I can’t quite make out his words.

“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t catch what you said.”

“Do you know how I can get to the bus station?” I think he says.

Absurdly, I tell him I’m not sure but I he could try going back to the main road then turn left and keep walking.

He thanks me and leaves. I go back to sleep.

When I wake up in the morning to normal sunlight showing me just how dusty and neglected this room is, I ask myself some questions, like, what was he doing here in the middle of the night? How did he even find it? Why would he be looking for the bus station at an hour when no buses are running? And why didn’t he have any luggage with him?

I pack away my sleeping bag and go across to the main building, intending to thank the little girl for letting me stay here. But although I knock on the door again, it’s clear that the building is deserted, derelict even. No one lives here.

And now I realise the guys in the pub knew that.

This is what I wrote in my diary that day:

“Saturday, 10th September, 1977: Seven and a half hours to hitch 40 miles. Irish must know I’m English and haven’t forgotten the Potato Famine. End up trundling down to Cork where locals buy me a pint or two. Then stagger into some kind of old school where nice little girl shows me where to sleep. Crash out on old classroom benches. Weird noises all night and mysterious man in white suit appears about 2 a.m., mumbles a few things then takes off.”

Here and now in my London street, I feel in my mind and heart and spirit that strange but utterly natural confluence of myth and event and perception.

What is the truth? I don’t think it’s just the description of an event, or even the mythical interpretation of it. A ghost? A real man in a white suit that just happened to seem to glow in the moonlight, who really was looking for a bus station? A little girl who was actually a folk archetype? Or a real girl who lived in the back of the building where her family had made a home despite the main school being decrepit?

The real truth is story. The reason it has lost some of its grasp on our minds today is because we’ve become polarised between, for instance, Evolutionary Theory on the one hand and Creationism on the other.

As I sit here tonight, weighing the value of my memories and searching them for stories that others may enjoy, I feel comfortable in not accepting either pole. Happy to just not know.

I don’t believe in ghosts but I think that man in Cork in 1977 really was one.