Michael Harding: The brutal killing of a fish brought it all homeIn a few moments the fish had been filleted into two halves of white flesh, from which a pastel of pale-pink blood seeped out on to the floorWed Jul 13 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: The S-word was a weapon that I fearedIt was a single-syllable knife that often sliced the air in front of my face to shame and silence meWed Jul 6 2016 - 01:00
'The magic of Cavan is that strangers talk to each other'Michael Harding is glad he lives in the present because, unlike the General, he's too squeamish to be a hunterWed Jun 29 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: I found Jesus in the woods as I was hugging a treeAs I grow old there is something in the gods I collect around me I am loath to renounceWed Jun 22 2016 - 07:00
Michael Harding: The beggar’s words horrified meI wasn’t certain what she meant, but my brain was in overdrive with the possibilitiesWed Jun 15 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: Ireland was fertile ground for the involuntary yelpIt was the only release we had from anxietyWed Jun 8 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: You can only go so far with a strange woman at 8am‘You’ll kill yourself with that junk,’ the woman said as she saw me ordering breakfast. The situation escalated from thereWed Jun 1 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: Some men play piano naked, some wear thermals in MayYears ago, when the General played the piano, I would frequently find him entirely nude in the drawing roomWed May 25 2016 - 08:05
Michael Harding: For men, growing old can be a solitary experienceI use Facebook to look in at all that intimacy without undermining my own solitudeWed Mar 23 2016 - 10:23
Michael Harding: I still have regrets about St Patrick’s Day 1976I could have gone in and shared my flask of whiskey with him at the fire, but I didn’tWed Mar 16 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: I could happily sit under a tree all day scratching myselfThe trouble with Homo sapiens seems to have started when we began eating wheat and became farmersWed Mar 9 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: I found comfort at a funeral after the isolation of winterThat’s one of the lovely things about rural Ireland: people know each other like old treesWed Mar 2 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: The small calamities of our mediocre existenceOne night in Warsaw I was lying in bed when an old man knocked on the door. He looked distraughtWed Feb 24 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: At home with the devout squirrels of WarsawI am writing about the absence of God but I didn’t want to be too grim in the face of Mrs Squirrel’s renowned religiosityWed Feb 17 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: Even death can’t uncouple my soul friends and meFRIENDSHIP WEEK: I am what my friends have made of me and I exist only in relation to themWed Feb 10 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: Awkward sex therapy in the doctor’s waiting roomWhile waiting it occurred to me that everyone must eventually arrive at the last orgasmWed Feb 3 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: Vegetables and exercise versus sadness and jealousyWhatever about vegetables, I’m certain that exercise is an enormous help to people who suffer from melancholy, so I bought a treadmillWed Jan 27 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: I suspect Patrick Pearse lived his life on the edge of sorrowWould romance have turned to melancholy if he had lived long enough?Wed Jan 20 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: Of cats and treacherous bastardsWhen I called to the General last week, he saw me as a turncoat. Such are the lines that get drawn when a husband and wife go to warWed Jan 13 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: Icons appear and my peak cap vanishesI was perfectly happy in that moment in the airport in Warsaw, until I realised that my hat was missingWed Jan 6 2016 - 01:00
Michael Harding: ‘Chinese people can stand longer – they weigh less,’ she saidThe American woman I met in Warsaw was frail but ferocious, and I was getting alarmed at the directness of her questionsWed Dec 30 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: The icon maker had lost his brother and I had lost GodBeyond the loneliness of grief after death, there is nothing more cutting than the blade of awakening that opens the heart when the last fragrance of God has witheredSun Dec 20 2015 - 07:00
Michael Harding: For years I thought of angels every time I saw snowThere was a young couple sheltering beside me in Warsaw, watching the snow. I wanted to say, ‘You are really a lovely couple.’ But I didn’t. I’m not that madWed Dec 16 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: The grey-skirted nun, the long johns and meWhen I bumped into the nun for a second time, I began to worry that she might think I was stalking her, or that I had a fetish about underpantsWed Dec 9 2015 - 10:21
Michael Harding: It’s only on the radio that depression sounds heroic‘Depression arrives like a flock of crows. But you must never let them sit,’ the poet warned meWed Dec 2 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: A London crow spoke bleakly from his perch by the barThe Londoner looked like a crow and the woman at the fire reminded me of a wrenWed Nov 25 2015 - 06:00
Michael Harding: The story of the decline of the mighty ashThe ash was a portal, a door into the other world. And now dieback is shutting that door.Sat Nov 21 2015 - 10:20
Michael Harding: Sometimes it seems as if all the world is sleepingOne morning I had a visitor. It was a neighbour. It was as if a savage God had arrived into my little solitude and smashed it to piecesWed Nov 18 2015 - 07:00
Michael Harding: Best cure for stress is to give up trying to relax‘There I was, paying €60 an hour to lie naked on an ironing board with my face in a hole’Wed Nov 11 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: The artist as terrorist is a dying speciesAn empiricism muffles the western world, and instead of wonder and awe we are offered the surreal and fake intelligence of streetwise truthWed Nov 4 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: The silence of rural men passes down the generationsOld men, in particular, used to be afflicted with low verbal abilityThu Oct 29 2015 - 12:49
Michael Harding: A knock on the door shocked me out of solitudeAt the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, an artists’ retreat, we make a faint attempt at social discourse over dinner. But it’s all a surfaceWed Oct 21 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: Hash cakes and other stories you wouldn’t tell to a guard‘I went to Amsterdam with the wife,’ said one of the men at the next table. ‘I thought we might do some drugs’Wed Oct 14 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: An admission of Irishness in an English country gardenI was at a garden party in Kent, where people could hide away at garden tables and chew burgers, drink wine and talk about David CameronWed Oct 7 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: I was getting too stressed in the fast lane in CavanAnd so I ended up in the Yeats Suite of the Eccles Hotel, a room bigger than a small houseWed Sep 30 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: Hot tip for an old goat looking to spice up his love life‘Maybe Yeats never heard of chillies,’ the General said. ‘That’s the stuff that can awaken the libido into pulsating flesh’Wed Sep 23 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: It’s important not to be seen doing T’ai-chi in Leitrim rainI met two friends in Mullingar recently. We have become wounded creatures whose attention has turned to cholesterol, back pain and the importance of avoiding fat foodsWed Sep 16 2015 - 06:19
Michael Harding: Isolation can overcome me like a great waveAll the Lonely People: It was one of those years that was going so well I thought I’d live forever. But then one day I got out of bed and the world had moved away from meWed Sep 9 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: Families discover each other as they get olderI suppose that’s also what Irish people like about going abroad: they begin noticing each otherWed Sep 2 2015 - 10:00
Lesser Spotted Ireland: ‘Everyone who comes to Donegal falls in love with it’A series in which Irish Times writers go off the beaten track: ‘Southwest Donegal is my favourite refuge, to rest, or be alone, or fall in love, intoxicated by the rugged energy of the landscape’Mon Jul 27 2015 - 06:00
Michael Harding: The pressure of other people made me flee the cityI suppose it’s not a good sign. Solitude gets no brownie points in the secular world of compulsive collectivityWed May 13 2015 - 18:00
Michael Harding: I could watch crows for hours. I see myself in themI know the savagery of the crow is buried in my psyche, and it manifests as rage when I meet an obstacle in life or don’t get my own wayWed May 6 2015 - 06:23
Michael Harding: Winter releases its clutch and the blur falls awaySpring wakens me early in the morning, as the dawn drags songs from the throats of little birdsTue Mar 24 2015 - 09:49
Michael Harding: On my travels, Turlough O’Carolan turns up a lotI suppose it’s because he too was a wandering poet, drifting through the country to perform for crowdsTue Mar 17 2015 - 12:58
Michael Harding: The unbearable bittern-ness of beingWhen Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna saw the bittern in the early 18th century, the bird was dead and stretched on ice. But I suppose Cathal Buí was projecting his own desperate bewilderment on to the world around himTue Mar 10 2015 - 04:38
Michael Harding: Life takes me from a play for love to a more solitary stageThe last time I was in a JB Keane play, I was a teacher looking for love and the local drama society was my only optionTue Mar 3 2015 - 05:30
Michael Harding: I can bear the winter but spring can be cruelest of allI’m getting addicted to the remote control again, which is a bad sign. It’s as if I can’t live without some sense of control, some assurance that the universe will not overpower meTue Feb 24 2015 - 13:36
Michael Harding: My rustic world seemed too small to be interesting on televisionI heard Brendan O’Connor telling jokes to the audience as I waited to go on to The Saturday Night Show. ‘What are you going to talk about?’ someone asked. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied in panicTue Feb 17 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: The longing to be touched gnaws away at many old menI’ve read erotic scenes in books over the years, but I never found anything in life as wonderful as the random promiscuity that could be generated with a Cavan Mineral Water bottle spinning on its sideTue Feb 10 2015 - 05:30
Michael Harding: How I know for sure that I am not CharlieI am not Catholic any more, nor Jew, nor Muslim. But then neither is GodTue Feb 3 2015 - 06:00