Michael Harding: The magpies and I could both do with shedding a bit of weight

I was on the Camino in Spain a few weeks ago. I began in Tui, not far from the Portuguese border and walked towards Santiago. It’s not easy trying to lose weight at my age. I have to try everything.

The problem is that I’m a dysfunctional eater. My mother used to love me with apple tarts and I learned early in life to express affection by eating large portions of food.

As a young man in Sligo I’d go to the Trades club every week to hear Josie McDermott on his flute and various singers and tin whistle players. But then I’d go home to my bedsit with a girlfriend and we would spend the early hours fumbling around the bed like we were trying to find a life raft in a storm. In the morning, after such tempestuous nights I always felt I should offer her breakfast. It seemed like the appropriate way to confirm my love. And she’d look at the sink full of last night’s plates, the dried tomato sauce on the rim of a saucepan and cigarette butts in the spaghetti bowl and she’d say, “Why don’t we go out for breakfast?”

Eventually I was spending a fortune on food so we agreed it wasn’t working and broke up.

Michael Harding: I stroll around car boot sales admiring the people making up a new kind of Ireland

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Michael Harding: The Camino only makes sense when it’s over

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Michael Harding: The magpies and I could both do with shedding a bit of weight

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The view from Fanad Lighthouse fills us with a sense of our own mortality

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That was all before I ended up with a stent, which just might have had something to do with my dysfunctional eating as well.

Nowadays I’m on tablets, my heart beats slower and the juices circulate with less fizz than when I was gallivanting around Sligo in 1975, and so the flesh builds around the heart and the belly wobbles before me as I stand at the mirror.

A few years ago when I was having a check-up my cardiologist tapped my stomach and joked that I was feeding myself very well.

And so ever since that grim comment I try to walk as much as I can. Which is why I’m on the Camino for the second time.

I know people think the pilgrimage is about religion but for me it’s not; it’s just about walking.

I was practising for a few weeks, up and down the hills of Arigna, and walking around Lough Key forest park near Boyle, a place I’m very fond of. The Forest Park has a beautiful visitor centre on the lakeshore that serves coffee and fresh croissants. And it’s difficult not to walk in the woodland around the lake without being grateful for all the colonial overlords who planted such beautiful trees. Half way around I met a couple from Cavan on their bicycles and, being from the same town, we stopped to talk.

They remarked that they had heard the cuckoo only an hour earlier as they were donning their head gear. They were strangely excited as they spoke and I told them that I had heard the cuckoo in the first week of April in Arigna.

“Ah sure Leitrim is a great place for the cuckoo,” he said. “We don’t hear it much in Cavan at all.”

“And why not,” I wondered. “Maybe you don’t have the windows open often enough in springtime.”

[ Tracking the cuckoo’s arduous African journey, to the Congo and back ]

“No,” he said, “It’s because the cuckoos don’t come to Cavan.”

“Tell me more,” I pleaded. By then I had realised that I was dealing with an amateur ornithologist.

He explained to me that the Cavan birds are much too clever to let a cuckoo into their nests. “Which would explain,” he concluded, “why they all go to Arigna and Leitrim.”

I wasn’t entirely amused by the theory, so I didn’t pursue the matter.

[ Meet Cuckoo KP, who is just back in Ireland after an epic 9,000km trip to Africa for the winter ]

“Well good luck,” I said, and they both got up on their bikes and pedalled away down the avenue that bends under the beautiful trees.

I suppose I should have told him about the magpies. I had noticed for some time that magpies in my garden have become disturbingly fat. They are as big as little chickens and can barely rise off the ground. They eat too much cat food, since the cats are eating mice in the fields at this time of year under the full moon.

So I suppose that’s one of the great things about the Camino. I find walking for hours takes my mind off the great anxieties of life in Leitrim, like why cuckoos avoid Cavan, and why magpies are so fat. I walk from morning until mid afternoon in rain and sunshine. But the problem arises in the evenings, because the food is so good that it makes me emotional and I eat like a horse.