Michael Harding: Families discover each other as they get older

I went to Galway last week to buy shoes in Foot Solutions. Inside I met a young Polish woman who examined my feet and wrote on a clipboard a lot of details about the length of my toes and how high my arches were. She said she was from Lodz, a city I walked through in the snow three years ago.

“I have recordings of Rubinstein on my iTunes playing Chopin,” I told her.

After two hours of watching me try on one pair of shoes after another, she was probably weary of me, but I finally made my choice and left the shop in a state of delight. I headed for McDonagh’s to get fish and chips, and the sun was shining on my head, which has not been a common occurrence this summer.

I was regretting that I had left my sunglasses in the car when I noticed a friend coming towards me in huge dramatic shades with amber frames. In fact it was the glasses I was staring at, and it was only when she took them off that I recognised her.

I kissed her cheek and suggested coffee, but she said she was heading to meet her brother for lunch. He was just home from America, and she was excited about spending the day with him.

“When we were young,” she said, “we didn’t get on at all. We argued all the time. But then one summer I was in New York and we began chatting in a cafe in the Village about poetry, and it turned out that he knew everything about Rumi. We talked so long and passionately that I felt I had not known him until that moment.”

I suppose that’s what Irish people like about going abroad: they begin noticing each other.

Then she noticed my bag of shoes.

“You were shopping,” she said.

I told her that I hurt my foot when I was walking up the mountain one day and when I took the shoes off I realised that the soles were worn away.

“Did you have a fall?” she wondered.

“Yes,” I said, “but in fact it was David Cameron who did the damage. And Donald Trump. ”

I had been sitting by the fire during the wet weather, hugging the stove for a week, until one morning I awoke and felt I had been brain-damaged from lack of oxygen. It made me crazy in the head. And so I got angry with the stove and decided to go for a walk. And although I got away from the stove, I was still carrying the anger. And that’s when I began thinking of Cameron and Trump. I needed a focus for the rage that was growing inside me. It’s not a good idea to get angry while you’re walking. Something always goes wrong. I suppose I was lucky I wasn’t walking along cliffs.

“You’d need to be careful with the stove,” she said.

I agreed. “In fact,” I said, “I won’t need as much fuel this winter because I’ve discovered tweed.”

She didn’t see the connection at first but I explained that, during the summer, my brother had given me a tweed waistcoat he found in a car-boot sale but wasn’t his size. I took it home and was amazed at the warmth it provided. I was so impressed that I spent many wet afternoons in July scouring the internet for vintage shops until I found a tweed shooting jacket for €40, which came in the post two weeks later.

“So I’m thinking that if I wear the tweed waistcoat with the shooting jacket when I’m indoors, I won’t need as much wood in the stove during the winter.”

I think she was getting a bit uneasy, because she looked at her watch and then checked her phone. Finally she put on her sunglasses so that she was hidden from me again and I couldn’t tell her how happy I was to meet her after all these years.

“I’d better fly,” she said. “Or I’ll be late.”

I watched her dash into McDonagh’s, which was a disaster for me because I could hardly go in after her. It would look as if I was following her. And I saw her hug a young man, and then her sunglasses came off to reveal her smiling eyes. That’s nice, I thought, the way families discover each other as they get older.

And it occurred to me that maybe I should text my own brother and tell him how much I appreciated the tweed waistcoat.