I bought a blue suit but never wore it because of Covid. Was it destined to debut in my coffin?

Sometimes after a radio interview I feel I’ve said too much. For example, recently when I was talking to Brendan O’Connor on his weekend show and I told him about the suit.

The story goes like this: I bought a blue suit but never wore it because of Covid. During the pandemic there was no chance to dress up. So it remained untouched for two years, during which time I was in hospital twice. But occasionally at home I’d open the wardrobe to fetch a dressing gown and I’d notice the suit hanging there, and I’d wonder would I end up wearing it for the first time in a coffin.

Sharing that kind of bleak thought is what the General would describe as gallows humour, but nonetheless it’s not entirely without plausibility - there are lots of people buried in suits. When I was a child there were men who never wore a suit in their entire life, yet they were togged out in the tailor’s finest cloth on their way to the graveyard.

Joking about misfortune is sometimes seen as tempting fate because stories have a way of imprisoning us.

Michael Harding: I stroll around car boot sales admiring the people making up a new kind of Ireland

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Michael Harding: The Camino only makes sense when it’s over

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Michael Harding: The magpies and I could both do with shedding a bit of weight

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The view from Fanad Lighthouse fills us with a sense of our own mortality

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It was the Civil War that destroyed the country. And it was fought over cattle. The pro-Treaty crowd knew where the market was for beef, and if the country had gone with the anti-Treaty crowd then where could a man sell his cattle?”

It reminds me of a man I met long ago in Ballina. He was wearing a brown herringbone suit, though it did nothing for his appearance because he had been drinking in it for years.

We were standing at the porch of a church. The wind was bracing, and he was smoking. His grimace showed more pain than joy as we spoke about the dark history of modern Ireland. His mother, who was at that moment stretched in the church behind us, had a difficult life living under the thumb of various civil and religious patriarchs.

“It was a terrible time,” my friend in the herringbone suit said. “But it was the Civil War that destroyed the country. And it was fought over cattle. The pro-Treaty crowd knew where the market was for beef, and if the country had gone with the anti-Treaty crowd then where could a man sell his cattle?”

We didn’t tarry long on the porch. He had other places to go: lonely barstools in public houses, where I feared he would sit listening to a voice in his own head for hours, or perhaps years, as he sought balm for a hurt mind.

But he was entirely certain that he possessed the true history of Ireland, a narrative of sorrow and brokenness, and he was trapped inside it.

Such is the danger of remembrance. The story folds itself around the teller and he or she becomes its prisoner.

[ Michael Harding: It was strange to be back in the hotel room where I had my heart attack ]

Clearly my story needed transformation. The suit hanging in the wardrobe like a blue shroud waiting for me to keel over required some alterations - some hopeful resolution. Which is why I got so much pleasure one day from taking it out and wearing it for a photo shoot. And as the camera clicked a thousand times the blue suit was transformed into a symbol of recovery.

Now, when I’m touring the country I see it gathered around my shoulders as I look out nervously from every publicity poster.

I met a woman recently who also had a facility for transforming her own narratives. We were chatting about that same dark Ireland of the 20th century, when suddenly she changed the subject.

“Actually my father was fond of horses,” she said. “He’d plough with a horse all morning and at midday he’d take the tackle off and give the horse a feed of oats and a bucket of water before he sat down to his own dinner. That’s how kind he was to animals. And we had a lovely donkey, too, called Mollie,” she added.

“Those were lovely times,” she said. And while there was a part of me that didn’t at all agree with her, there was another part of me that did

Then she turned to the memory of her mother.

“She was very much ahead of her time,” she said. “I remember her making meringues. She whisked the egg whites in a cream bowl and we watched with amazement when they came out of the oven later.”

The meringue brought a smile to her face like the light of the sun, and for a moment all the dark histories of Ireland were forgotten in the glow of that small remembering.

“Those were lovely times,” she said.

And while there was a part of me that didn’t at all agree with her, there was another part of me that did.

And as for the suit? Well, words could not adequately describe the pleasure I get from putting it on every morning and living one day at a time.