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 09 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 02 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 04 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 07 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 Sept 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 Sept 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 Sept 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 Sept 09 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 Sept 02 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 06 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 03 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 03 2015 - 06:00
Michael Harding: The stillness of a young woman’s gaze can be as frightening as the edge of a cliffI felt unsafe in Bucharest, and the woman who showed me to my apartment was inscrutableTue Jan 27 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: ‘Did you ever watch a woman eating a lamb chop?’So the General asked me recently, changing the subject from his prostate examTue Jan 20 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: Flirting is like playing tennis without the ballWhat makes it work is spontaneity and the unimportance of the subjectTue Jan 13 2015 - 06:00
Michael Harding: Self-obsession is a complete waste of timeThe ultimate reality is that we are all connected. This is a very wise ideaTue Jan 06 2015 - 10:03
Michael Harding: The vet said there was nothing he could doThere was no stress. Gradually my cat Roxie’s head drooped and I placed her sideways and watched her inhale each final breath, like an oarsman crossing a riverTue Dec 30 2014 - 09:00
Michael Harding: The vet said there was nothing he could doThere was no stress. Gradually my cat Roxie’s head drooped and I placed her sideways and watched her inhale each final breath, like an oarsman crossing a riverTue Dec 30 2014 - 01:00
Michael Harding: My therapist says it’s good to be motheredI don’t care when my friends try to uncouple me from the delusion that some great mother in the sky is holding us. I know as well as anyone else that there is only silence beyond the grave. But faith is an act of the imaginationTue Dec 23 2014 - 01:00
Michael Harding: When I got there her clothes were all strewn on the floorIt was 1973. My American girlfriend was great at kissing. I was terrible. And in the middle of it she would ask questions that made no sense to meTue Dec 16 2014 - 08:28
Michael Harding: Water is so potent even St Patrick didn’t mess with itIt’s not just that our masters want money to service the reservoir system or upgrade the pipes. That would be fine. But they want the water itself, drop by dropTue Dec 09 2014 - 13:03
Michael Harding: The lights go out on another solitary country lifeWhen a farmer dies in the countryside, there is a strange emptiness in the fieldsTue Dec 02 2014 - 07:14
Michael Harding: Zen and the art of showing compassion to carrotsA lesson in empathy on the train to SligoTue Nov 25 2014 - 12:00
Michael Harding: A man in the corner had tears in his eyes for some reasonListening to the accordion music of Tony McMahon could allow a man to live with his own lonelinessTue Nov 18 2014 - 12:00
Michael Harding: I have often wished that I was a womanWomen are open because that’s the nature of connecting with other humans, whereas what makes me depressed is my inability to connect with anybodyTue Nov 11 2014 - 01:00
Michael Harding: The blackthorn bush that rose up out of nowhereThe old man pointed to a bush at the gable of his house with yellowing leaves and purple berries. ‘Oh, look,’ he said. ‘A blackthorn bush. And it wasn’t there this morning’Tue Nov 04 2014 - 01:00
Michael Harding: For the most part of any day I live a bewildered lifeMusic induces in me a clarity of thought far beyond the fog of religion or philosophyTue Oct 28 2014 - 09:48
‘Oh dear God,’ I said, ‘it’s Joan Baez.’ But it wasn’tMichael Harding: It was her skin that interested me. I refused to accept she was 65Tue Oct 21 2014 - 15:15
Our Lady of the Telephone and the Palestinian poetI usually try to avoid politics, but I had been asked to collect Rafeef ZiadahTue Oct 14 2014 - 01:00
The mare looked at me and warmed me to my coreHorses were no more than objects until finally I sat up on one and was forced to trust her. That was intimateTue Oct 07 2014 - 01:00
It’s a frog’s life in the shadow of the lawnmowerI’m melancholic, so I’m constantly afflicted by depressive emotions. Frogs, on the other hand, are more committed to the present momentTue Sept 30 2014 - 01:00
The Zen approach to sheep control in 1970s IrelandIt had never occurred to me that someone in rural Ireland might have been passing the winter with books on Zen back thenTue Sept 23 2014 - 01:00
