I WAS TRYING to light the fire, so I could snooze in my rocking chair; a chair I bought when I lived in Fermanagh, to comfort myself, because back then the ceiling used to shake when roadside bombs exploded somewhere out in the darkness, and I have lugged the old chair around with me ever since, writes MICHAEL HARDING

I didn’t want to go out in the rain for kindling twigs so I made do with firelighters beneath the coal.

The rain on the floor of the coal shed had crept up into the bags, and the bucket of coal was as wet as Cavan slack.

After a few moments the firelighter fizzled out. It’s a mistake to buy cheap firelighters.

I opened the box to get another one and I realised that they were all gone.

The rain was pouring down outside the window, and the house was cold, and that’s when I decided to take to the bed.

I take to the bed regularly for a variety of reasons; exhaustion, depression, the flu, and occasionally because it’s a wet November day and there is nothing more delicious than sitting up in the duvets, and pillows, reading Jung Chang, or just watching the clouds being tossed across the sky, exactly as they used to be, when I was a child in bed, and home from school for the day.

Back then I was keenly excited at being young, and having “everything ahead of me”, as the old people used to say. The only difference now is that I am excited and elated by the fact that everything is behind me; the failures of a lifetime, the mistakes, wrong turns and bad choices are all past history.

And I now realise that I learned more in life from mistakes than from successes, so I can gladly sing with Cat Stevens that “I am old but I am happy”. “That’s a blessing,” the poet said.

The poet arrived mid-morning, with two children in his Citroen. It was a surprise visit.

He knocked on the front door. I shouted down that it was open. He came in and followed my voice up the stairs. He sat in the wicker chair by the window and asked me did I have swine flu. I said I was as healthy as a trout, but that I liked to read in bed.

He said, “That’s a blessing.” I said, “What is?” He said, “Your health.” I asked him how he was coping with the recession.

Being a Cavan poet, he replied with a riddle.

“I’m too poor to paint, and too proud to whitewash,” he said.

His two little girls ran about downstairs, giggling and screaming, so he went out and spoke to them softly from the landing, asking them for quietness.He’s a big soft man, a man that would cry to see ducks walk barefoot, and a good father.

“Your daughters are lucky,” I said. He was staring at a big white porcelain angel sitting on the top of my wardrobe.

“Where did that come out of?” he asked.

I said: “I bought it in Cavan, on Saturday”. He said, “I didn’t know that there was an angel shop in Cavan.”

“There is,” I assured him. “It’s in the old convent where all the little orphans were burned to death decades ago and where Mother Carmel taught me to read. The shop is called New Beginnings. And they sell angels, and Buddhas and crystals and incense, and they do angel card readings on Saturday afternoons.” The poet looked out the window.

“It’s a great gift,” he said. “To be able to read the future.” When I was a child there was a commonly quoted prophecy that the length of time remaining until the end of the world could be measured out in dead popes.

Apparently there was only so many popes God might tolerate and then he would draw the line and say enough was enough.

Another prophecy was that before the end of the world Ireland would sink under water.

I knew that a rainy season was a terrible thing because Father Pat, a distant cousin, always found the rainy season in Nigeria unbearable.

Sometimes he would visit my mother, and sit in a rocking chair beside the kitchen range, with a face like a broken vase, and mutter under his breath, that things in Owerri were getting very bad.