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 6 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 9 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 2 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 4 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 7 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 Sep 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 Sep 23 2014 - 01:00
He even tried to sleep with her, which was a disasterA light film of libidinous sweat shimmering just below his nostrilsTue Sep 9 2014 - 01:00
One for sorrow, two for joy, magpie Irish gets us byBecause my conversation with a fellow student of Irish in Donegal was so limited, we were forced to live in the presentTue Sep 2 2014 - 09:56
Taxi talk turns to Garth Brooks and Dublin’s anti-jiving biasThey can’t abide happy culchies coming up and screaming their heads off in Croke Park and dancing around O’Connell Street, the driver told meThu Jul 31 2014 - 01:00
I prefer simple stories that begin with small eventsI was in Galway. No matter what I did, I couldn’t avoid inhabiting one story or anotherTue Jul 22 2014 - 01:00
Orfeo is not the only one who’s been to hell and backAt a hotel in Clonmel, a middle-aged couple made a dramatic entrance, like a pair welded together in the hell of matrimonyThu Jul 17 2014 - 01:00
I am too pessimistic to find joy in communal hot tubsI used to think young people went to festivals just to get drunk or do drugs. At Body and Soul I realised I was wrongThu Jul 10 2014 - 01:00
Dermot Healy was afflicted with an unruly mindIn his most famous work, A Goat’s Song, he excelled himself in revealing the Irish male as the dreamer, the broken thing that a man becomes when the women have gone awayTue Jul 1 2014 - 01:00
The sadness of a sandwich reminded me of nunsA picnic is just a matter of getting to some place where you can relax, and for me there is nowhere better than the cliffs of DonegalTue Jun 24 2014 - 11:50
Her eyes were beautiful – I was only telling the truthDermot Healy once remarked that the people with the most beautiful eyes in the world often live by the ocean, which is certainly true for BelmulletThu Jun 19 2014 - 01:00
Thoughts about priests in a priestless worldIn college I knew priests who smoked pipes and shot pheasants, priests who would drink all night long, and chaplains who slept with teachersThu Jun 12 2014 - 01:00
The hopefulness of dance and the dangers of lettuce‘When we sit down to eat, we need to make sure that there’s blood running out of whatever is on the plate,’ said the GeneralThu Jun 5 2014 - 01:00
Once upon a time on a train to Lung-fordThe young couple with backpacks became absorbed by each other like lovers in a play by ShakespeareThu May 29 2014 - 01:00
Bundoran is a great remedy for melancholy‘Lounging around in pyjamas and watching a Vietnamese monk talking about suffering is no excuse for a life,’ a friend told meThu May 22 2014 - 01:00
In Ireland, unlike Tibet, the dead are everywhereIrish people are so afflicted by melancholy that even the living look like they are carrying dead weightThu May 15 2014 - 10:03
Putin was naked and his skin covered in feathersThe idea of the president of all the Russias up there with claw feet shaking the chimney pot was not doing me any good at allTue May 6 2014 - 12:31
Beautifully obscure logic on the slow bus to DublinA man with a peaked cap and a long nose hopped on behind me, sat down beside me and started talkingThu May 1 2014 - 01:00
My inheritance: an endless litany of anxietiesAfter my mother died, I was able to decipher all her worries from every little note and memo and grocery list she left behindTue Apr 22 2014 - 12:20
There’s no telling why the good sometimes die youngA BBC drama about the first World War got me thinkingThu Apr 17 2014 - 01:00
Brothers separated by an ocean, linked by lonelinessThe brother in Ireland sometimes called Chicago, although the two spoke little except about the weatherThu Apr 10 2014 - 01:00
The difference between Shakespeare and JoyceA trip to London led me to the National Theatre’s brilliant ‘King Lear’ and to ‘Riverrun’, Olwen Fouéré’s show based on texts from ‘Finnegans Wake’Thu Apr 3 2014 - 01:02
Gardening, dead wood and the dark night of the soulI began gardening on St Patrick’s Day. It was a strategy to avoid parades and then I started to like itThu Mar 27 2014 - 01:00
‘I started in the gym for Lent, which was a terrible mistake’The General says exercise can be bad for your healthTue Mar 18 2014 - 11:16
A therapy session with a woman in a tartan skirtThe old man in me was thinking she should go and have a wash. The young man in me was regretting we hadn’t more timeTue Mar 11 2014 - 17:00
What I love most about women is their voicesMy earliest recollection is of women chattering above my cot. In adolescence, my greatest comfort was the soft, posh voices of female presenters on BBC Radio 3Thu Mar 6 2014 - 01:00
Old minds quietly running footage on interior screensSometimes I find stillness in old people. They sit in kitchens, pretending to watch the television, or wait on verandas in wheelchairs for visitorsThu Feb 27 2014 - 01:00
Close encounters with a badger and the woman who nursed me as a childI’m always amazed at who I bump into when I’m out and about – and by what they might sayTue Feb 18 2014 - 10:54
Her wetsuit wasn’t sexy and felt as cold as a fishThere were huge waves in Mullaghmore on the day my friend diedThu Feb 13 2014 - 01:00
I could see where the shots had peppered his chestI have been remembering an old friend, who had no limits, which may be why he clung to drink so much, and why he tried suicide with a gunThu Feb 6 2014 - 01:00
Under blue skies, the blackness has changedI’m not getting overexcited about anything and I’m not wallowing in despair. It’s a kind of equilibrium that I usually associate with fishermenThu Jan 30 2014 - 01:00