The sea spat like a thug into the back garden; fitful clouds unleashed volley after volley of rain; and all around the wind howled as if a ghostly cavalry charge had borne down upon Termon House, an 18th-century architectural curiosity perched above a narrow, stone-wracked beach. It was New Year’s Eve on the turbulent coast of Donegal, and inside the kitchen of this lonely guesthouse, the gaggle of celebrants - refugees from the forced gaiety of Dublin and London - were girding themselves for literary battle. Sort of.

”You’re kidding,” said Ann Keatings, an applied linguist, as she absorbed the news I had brought from the US, where I have lived for the past 12 years: Americans see the semicolon as punctuation’s axis of evil. Or at least many of them do. “But I like semicolons,” she protested, “they allow a writer to go further.” Trevor McGuinness, a business manager, was equally incredulous. “Hazlitt,” he said, smacking the table indignantly, “look at Hazlitt!” Had midnight been closer and the bottle emptier, we might have taken him literally; but the point still floated within the grasp of sober minds: if so great a prose stylist as William Hazlitt had embraced the semicolon, then surely we could too?