I was standing outside a shop waiting for my friends one Saturday morning – the girl beside me in my “first day at school” photo, now 40, and her two beautiful daughters, when I heard singing.

I looked up, and a handsome lad of 18 or 19 was sticking his head out of a window two storeys up, surveying his world. Perhaps it was just because it was another sunny day, perhaps because he had a date that evening, perhaps because his football team won the night before, he was letting rip with a ballad of sorts – I couldn’t hear the words. His voice had a cracked, soulful quality. Perhaps he had just woken up. He wasn’t a “good” singer by any means, too slight a range, but he put his heart into it. He didn’t see me looking at him, or didn’t care. It was self-expression at its simplest. I was transfixed, as if I were under a tree listening to a blackbird bursting with natural joy. A communion. He finished his song and he disappeared. No one else appeared to notice him. My friends came out of the shop, and we went for a cappuccino down the road. We were in Italy, in southern Tuscany, in a small town. It was market day. The sun was shining. All was well.

One of the first books I ever read as a child was about an Italian ice-cream maker, who had a secret recipe for the most beautiful gelati in the world. It made him famous – and, I forget the plot, it was so long ago, but the secret to the exquisite taste was that he sang while he was making it. I understand that now. I get to Italy as often as I can, courtesy of the ever-frustrating but essential Ryanair, and stay with my Irish family friends, Dubliners all, who have woven themselves into Italian rural life with apparent ease – not that it wasn’t without working themselves to the bone. They miss the craic, but the riches around them compensate, in an eternally beautiful countryside. Ferociously guarded by strict planning laws, there are no hacienda-style bungalows ulcerating the Tuscan landscape as in Ireland. The food is sublime and cheap (Euros making the difference appallingly obvious), the pace gentle, the attitude to life and eccentricity is warm and engaged. Like country life the world over, everyone knows everyone else’s business, and the politics of a small village are often intricate and pressurised. But what one loses in privacy, one gains in a sense of belonging. Big City anonymity offers the opportunity for re-invention like no other. But, once one has reinvented oneself, then one needs to put roots down again somewhere, or something fundamental about life is lost.

Coming to England nine years ago to study has done me a lot of good in many ways; next year will see me completing my student days, once and for all, with a Master’s degree. With it comes the prospect of being able to afford to move back to an increasingly unfamiliar Dublin. I’ve learned a lot about myself and the world while I’ve been away. But there is something about living in England that has worn me down in a subtle way – and I only notice it when I get to experience the effortless joie de vivre of the Italians, or the chutzpah of New Yorkers. Englanders are repressed, there’s no two ways about it. There’s a look that I get from some people in England that I only ever encounter there. It’s a look of slight alarm, as I launch into a diatribe about politics or philosophy, or anything that matters to me. The unease is often fleeting, and is covered up very efficiently, but, each time I see it, I wish I was back in an Irish pub putting the world to rights without anyone thinking my passion was (even slightly) odd. I don’t feel judged in that way in Ireland (I bring that around me wherever I go).

But the English don’t really understand the passion of foreigners, especially those with fiery Latin or Celtic cultures, and, for themselves, they mistake passion for sex. They’re not really the same, and I’m only just beginning to figure that out.

The Latin storyteller, Pedro Almodóvar, has come up with a stunning example of what I mean in his latest, Talk To Her. It is a sensuous and moving film about emotional, passionate men, like no other I’ve seen. One of the men, an Argentinian journalist, shamelessly weeps, and it’s one of the main motifs of the film. I left the film cheerfully wet-faced. But for the weather, I think the Irish are Mediterranean at heart.

Perhaps, being an arousal junkie, I use travel, or anything that gives me the illusion of novelty, as a key to escape the sameness of being me. But the mind-broadening qualities of travelling are about perspective and perception, the opportunity to see for yourself the endless ways human beings have invented to fill each day, and the spirit in which they do so. In my puzzlings over this often oxymoronic business of being a gay Irishman, I have found that a good dose of Latin joie de vivre blows away the clammy Celtic fog of shame, original (sex) sin, like no other. Listening to that young man singing shows me the way I can sing in my life.

It’s that simple. There is no knack to it, no mystery. You just need to hear it to know it.