The South Circular Road. Night. Early twentieth century houses; two, three and four storeys. Eyes at some of the windows (inside and out). Students from all over the world, looking for fast food. People lingering near the back of late-night supermarkets, socialising alone among groceries that will pass their sell-by date at midnight. If midnight ever arrives. And if it does, then today's (what day is it?) newspapers will have to be taken out and shot, to make room for tomorrow's. Again the if.

Redbrick houses split into daft numbers of flats. Every language carefully spoken wrong. A thousand houses, perhaps, and maybe a hundred times that many doorbells. Press the right one and you never who know'll come down to answer.

Follow the Road west and you'll come to the battlefields of the Somme (carefully reconstructed according to something other than historical fact), the rolling priaires of the Wild West, where the saloons ring with Dublin pub songs and girls aren't allowed in, and finally the house of Ma and Pa Ubu, at which point the whole thing starts all over again.

It was sometime late in what was then referred to as the Twentieth Century that I last walked the South Circular road, expectant of midnights that frequently arrived but just as regularly didn't, so I can't vouch for the absolute specifics of the geography. Things change, of course. But only to become more like themselves. some of us who used to be cartoons are barely even doodles these days, thinking ourselves lucky to have made it out of that century alive.

Brian O'Toole made it out of the Twentieth Century. Just. He handed in his paybook, upped stumps and retired to the pavilion on the first of September, 2001; a big heavy month, if memory serves. We'll have no more of those pictures he used to draw.

I knew the pictures before I knew Brian. Single frame winks from a universe made out of things found down the back of the sofa. Funny pictures. Upsetting pictures. But very definitely bulletins from someplace real. And there's no ointment for the itch the slightest bite from one of them leaves.

I only met Brian once, and I can't have caught more than a quarter of the talk he gifted me. And all in that epic Liverpool accent. The chat ranged all over the place. But he wasn't a one-upper- he didn't just wear the stuff he knew like a badge. If anything, the depth and breadth of his knowledge was wearing him. Or they were wearing each other. But lightly. So he liifted you up with him when he took off into the music of it all, making connections between and quoting from (as I remember it) George Orwell on boys' papers; the Apocrypha; The Tough of the Track; Charles Maturin; Frank Randle; William Carleton; Jet Ace Logan and Captain Condor as copies of Dan Dare (and in their own right as well, of course)...

I don't remember chatting about James Joyce and/or Samuel Beckett at all.But after Brian returned to Liverpool (you won't believe me when I tell you he made his living there carving gravestones) I started picturing that pair of faces peering uncertainly from one of the above-mentioned windows along the South Circular Road.

I'd seen drawings of the two lads by Brian before, so he'd already planted that one on me. So I just wrote something. Kellie Strom liked it and provided the extra spring of energy to get it to Brian. And then...silence.

You got used to silences from Brian. Long ones, sometimes. But you know how this story plays out: Lo and behold, one fine morning a letter (remember them?) slaps quietly onto the hall floor and it's got that unmistakeable writing of Brian's all over it.

The complete adventures of Shem and Sam span just four pages. Three stories. We were in the early stages of hatching another when Brian's number came up. I spoke to him by phone in the hospice from which he saw out the last of it. He never stopped being Brian O'Toole, which was a blessing. And the last rush of it came fairly quickly.

But such was the nature of our little connection that he's always existed more in my imagination than in reality anyway. So that doesn't go away. And now, once you've passed even a casual eye over these works of his, he'll live in yours too.

He's a quiet enough tenant. Keeps mostly to himself. Fond of a chat. Draws pictures.

Goodnight, Brian.

Stephen Walsh teaches screenwriting at Trinity College, Dublin, as well as a couple of other colleges. He co-wrote and narrated Sé Merry Doyle's documentary "Patrick Kavanagh -- No Man's Fool"; and is co-producer and co-writer of a feature film, "Where The Sea Used To Be," directed by Paul Farren, currently in production. He is also working with comics artist Keith Page on a couple of projects, including "London Calling", a story equally inspired by "Ealing comedies and Quatermass movies." As it happens in Echoland, Walsh's most recent documentary with Sé Merry Doyle for Loopline Film is "John Henry Foley – Sculptor of the Empire," who made both the O'Connell monument in Dublin and significant parts of the Albert Memorial in London.