Michael Harding: ‘I tried to cook a sausage with a hairdryer,’ he told me. ‘And then I ate it. The pain is terrible’

Being 69 is not so bad. At least I can say that I’m not yet 70. But I’m on the edge of old age and even in summer I wear good suits that I buy in Magees of Donegal so that I don’t look entirely like a scarecrow on a wet day.

That’s what you need to do at my age: spruce up the image. When I was young I could wear an old jacket or wrinkled trousers with frayed hems and still look well. But at 69 you have to make a fierce effort to avoid being labelled a doddery old man. Which is why I wore a linen suit and a silk tie all summer; being old is expensive.

The General is even worse than doddery. Last week he was lying on the flat of his back when I arrived at his front door. Even his jeep looks like something out of Killinaskully.

“Thank God you’ve arrived,” he said when I walked into the front room. “The pain is terrible.”

How Ireland drinks now: Teetotallers, wine-o’clockers and ex-drinkers

---

Mark Moriarty: two 15-minute meals made easy, with a few simple tricks

---

Every time I travel abroad I am gripped by the fear that Ireland is making a fool of me

---

A personal housing plan: Move to Newry, buy for €150,000 less, commute to Dublin

---

He was lying on the sofa with his distended gut rising in the air and his face as tortured as the astronaut in Alien, the movie where a monster finally gets born from a human belly. The General pulled up his shirt to show me in more detail the white orb’s magnificence.

“You look like you’re going to lay the egg of a dinosaur,” I joked, although I was uneasy about the size of the bulge. I could imagine the flabby muscle of his little heart palpitating away somewhere inside that mountain of fat.

“That’s a very big belly you have there, General,” I said. “What’s the matter?”

“I tried to cook a sausage with a hairdryer,” he said. “And then I ate it. But it was still raw.”

“You can’t cook anything with a hairdryer,” I pointed out. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s a new type of dryer,” he explained. “It’s like a box, and you put the food inside in a container.”

“Ah,” I said, “that’s an air fryer.”

“Correct,” he said, “a hairdryer.”

“So what happened,” I wondered, “when you ate the sausage?”

“I was vomiting all night. Now I’m lying here like a sick frog waiting to die.”

“Did you take any medication?” I asked.

“I took a few whackers of brandy,” he said, “but it made no difference. The bile still rose up.”

A whacker, as far as I know, is half of a half; it was a fashionable measure of brandy years ago at Cavan Golf Club.

“I filled the basin three times last night,” the General said, pointing at a red plastic basin on the floor. “Pasta, carrots, even bits of chicken from last Sunday’s lunch came up. Not to mention that accursed sausage.”

“Perhaps the brandy made things worse,” I suggested.

“It was the sausage,” he roared. “And that f**king hairdryer.”

If this happened 20 years ago myself and the General would have laughed it off, gone down to the Greville Arms Hotel for a feed of roast beef from the lunch menu and washed it down with few glasses of beer; but age has made us fragile.

He wobbled up the stairs towards his bedroom before I left the building, and when he turned to say goodbye from the top of the stairs I saw an old man before me, greatly diminished in his power, although he smiled at the absurdity of his predicament.

And I know I’m not very far behind him. I met a woman in Supermac’s a few months ago when I was coming home from a consultation at the Galway Clinic, and while I was finishing a cheese-and-bacon burger she sat down to talk to me.

“That’s not very good for your heart,” she said, “especially when you have a stent.”

“How do you know I have a stent?” I wondered.

“I read your books,” she said.

She stared at the burger — and, to be honest, there was more meat, saucy goo, rasher and cheese on it than would be good for any person with coronary issues.

And when I had devoured every morsel and washed it down with a Diet Coke I examined my image in the bathroom mirror; gravity and age were conspiring against me. I thought of the General flailing on his couch like a stranded whale and I decided that it might be wise to cut down on the burgers, and perhaps invest in a tidy woollen suit for the winter.