‘Doing my taxes I felt incompetent as a child and wept’Michael Harding: I felt as incompetent as the child I once was, and still am, insideWed Oct 30 2019 - 07:00
Making a bed in a camper van after six pints? It’s dangerousMichael Harding: Songs and music in a west of Ireland pub provide nourishment for the soulWed Oct 23 2019 - 06:00
The man who called his wife ‘the beloved’ like he was sucking a sweetMichael Harding: It was only when the couple spoke about Russia that I saw behind their masksWed Oct 16 2019 - 06:00
I made a joke about Mayo and Canada. The Canadian was not amusedMIchael Harding: I didn’t think anyone would take offence in a filling station in CastlebarWed Oct 09 2019 - 06:00
What’s worse than a fat man squeezed into small togs? A man my age in tattered togsMichael Harding: Such moments of openness are dangerous because they form the threshold of love; when a stranger becomes a belovedWed Oct 02 2019 - 06:00
My daughter left for Australia and now there’s an absence which nothing can cureMichael Harding: I didn’t show emotion. I sorted all that out in the garden on SundayWed Sept 25 2019 - 07:03
‘Like many other victims of suicide, he simply fell through the net of care and love around him’Michael Harding: Yet another fine young man falls victim to the scourge of suicideWed Sept 18 2019 - 06:00
‘I have been free from melancholy since the heart attack. The stent woke me up’But leaving Donegal and driving through Leitrim, I felt sad again and lonely . . . until I saw her at the door and realised that the beloved is the keyWed Sept 11 2019 - 06:00
The man beside me on the plane took off his shoes and socks to cut his toenailsMichael Harding: I kept telling myself it was funny, although I had sporadic urges to open the emergency door and shove him and his toenails into spaceWed Sept 04 2019 - 06:00
I had an urge to go to Belarus. Fortunately, I had a heart attackMichael Harding: Booking flights on a whim is dangerous. I’m off to Minsk for a week of monastic livingWed Aug 28 2019 - 06:00
I bottled my rage for years until some therapist could take it out of my guts like ashes'Don’t look so scared,' my friend said, as I stepped across the thresholdWed Aug 21 2019 - 21:05
The sean-nós singer continued, verse after slow verse. Then a phone rangMichael Harding: If he had flung the thing out the window, we would have applaudedWed Aug 14 2019 - 06:00
Irish music is a repetitive hum that dissolves the egoMichael Harding: You can’t get angry at a music festival. It’s poison to the singing heartWed Aug 07 2019 - 06:00
‘I like to keep up with the intellectual wing of the DUP’Michael Harding: A more charming man than Jim Wells you could not meet in a day’s marchingWed Jul 31 2019 - 06:00
‘I needed a lot of comfort as a child because I felt stupid’Michael Harding: Even now I am regularly overwhelmed by my own sense of stupidityWed Jul 24 2019 - 06:00
Would my dead mother’s voice from old recordings destroy my warm memories?Michael Harding: How did I get from my mother to Nigel Farage turning his arse to Beethoven?Wed Jul 17 2019 - 06:00
‘I’m burdened by the life I never lived, by the wild man I never released’Michael Harding: I had visions of hot tubs in the woods, shamanic rituals and Asian massage therapies, and chilling out with beautiful strangersWed Jul 10 2019 - 06:00
‘I learned storytelling from country people and Travellers’Michael Harding: In the old days country people were slow to talk about personal or emotional mattersWed Jul 03 2019 - 06:00
How do you get ticks out of your arse? Slap a bit of butter on themMichael Harding: ... or hold the flame of a cigarette lighter close to the tick's backsideWed Jun 26 2019 - 06:00
The man with five stents thought my skirmish with death was nothing to brag aboutMichael Harding: He had five stents to my one but you wouldn’t catch him making a gobshite of himself by talking about it on the radioWed Jun 19 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: I like to gaze at Claire Danes’ face in Homeland. Her survival is reassuringCarrie Mathison is not just a mythic figure on the screen. She also survives inside meWed Jun 12 2019 - 06:00
Trump visiting Ireland? ‘We should be on our knees with gratitude,’ he saidI called the General about a misplaced mackerel but he had other things on his mindWed Jun 05 2019 - 13:23
Michael Harding: I see my late mother in the mirror since I went on heart tabletsNow that I have begun to slow down myself, I find her everywhereWed May 29 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: Some people claimed the hawthorn bush smelled of sexBut there is something terribly tender in the white bush that lifts my heart every yearWed May 22 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: Does Poland need a State visit from Panti Bliss?Watching Panti on stage in full flight, it struck me that show business is also a fight against the darkWed May 15 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: I decided to have another go at finding a camper vanI woke at dawn and walked the beach reflecting on how splendid it was to be aloneWed May 08 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: Notre Dame and the farmer who died by the light of the moonThat cathedral felt like it belonged not to Paris but Europe, and the fire seemed to awaken something across the continentWed May 01 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: I’ve gone through life without cutting anyone’s toenailsA retired nurse who performs that charitable act for old men saved me from melancholyWed Apr 24 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: A woman with the cure said oatmeal could fix my heart‘You look very poorly, sir,’ she told me. ‘You look as sick as a small hospital’Wed Apr 17 2019 - 06:00
‘Vegans just don’t drive the same vehicles as meat eaters’Michael Harding: I find meaning driving around with white leather under my arseWed Apr 10 2019 - 09:31
In Leitrim, sometimes I don't know if it's raining or if I am living in a cloudMichael Harding: The two of us stand at the end of the garden. The lake below, the moon aboveWed Apr 03 2019 - 06:00
‘I presumed the two tribes of Ulster might eventually blend, as folks do at a wedding’Michael Harding: The blood shed during the Troubles only nourished separate identitiesWed Mar 27 2019 - 06:00
‘Stupidity has been a heavy burden since childhood’Michael Harding: My mother once gazed at me and, with one question, opened up an appalling possibilityWed Mar 20 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: ‘What the f**k are you doing in bed?’ said the woman demanding champagneThere’s a Dublin wedding at the hotel, and a nocturnal party animal I want to avoid at breakfastWed Mar 13 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: I wanted to warm my arse in freezing Warsaw. So I went to churchI find it consoling to contemplate death, not as an ending, but a transformationWed Mar 06 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: No wonder the graveyards are full of young menYoung people in Dublin are just as distressed as they are in LeitrimWed Feb 27 2019 - 06:00
‘I loved my friend as a man sometimes loves another man’Michael Harding: ‘Thank you, Bernard Loughlin, my mentor, elder and guide’Wed Feb 20 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: ‘The nuns disappeared very fast in the end, like snow off a rope’The last nun in town, switching off church lights and the plastic statue I came to ownWed Feb 13 2019 - 06:00
‘Are you the man who had the heart attack? How could you be so stupid?’Michael Harding: ‘Indigestion,’ she scoffed, ‘between your shoulder blades!’Wed Feb 06 2019 - 07:27
Michael Harding: After my heart attack I needed more exercise so I went to AldiSelf-pity afflicts me, I spent most of Christmas brooding about my illnessWed Jan 30 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: ‘Good morning sir. Did you order an ambulance?’ said the hotel receptionistAs I walked out of hospital I was overwhelmed with gratitude. I wanted to hug the entire hospital and everyone in itWed Jan 23 2019 - 06:00
Michael Harding: ‘My indigestion turned out to be a heart attack’I stood pot-bellied in my pyjamas and began leaping through half remembered tai chi movements like a duck trying to dance the lead in Swan LakeWed Jan 16 2019 - 06:00
‘Writers are like mongrel dogs. They lick everything off the ground’Michael Harding: ‘If I ever saw that poet again,’ the ferryman said, ‘I would gladly take him on board, but he would never reach the island’Wed Apr 04 2018 - 06:00
Leitrim is being invaded by spruce trees, and they're closing in, like a slow moving armyIt bothers me what will happen when the entire county has been plantedTue Mar 27 2018 - 19:52
Getting my glasses fixed in Carrick reminded me that melancholy never lastsMichael Harding: even as a teenager, the sorrow of things was forcing me to speak, and the best grammar available was the exquisite innuendo of metaphorWed Mar 21 2018 - 07:58
She spoke no English so we used the international language of soupMichael Harding: My friend in Warsaw left me in a restaurant with a frail little woman I couldn’t talk toWed Mar 14 2018 - 06:00
Michael Harding on Room Little Darker: ‘so much fun you’ll probably frighten yourself’Book Club: ‘Stories spin with such control and elegance you must read them. Feel the sweat of it. The passionate hotness of it. The power and pulse that lie at the heart of it’Mon Mar 12 2018 - 11:15
Tea is the limit of my intimacy when someone unexpected calls to the doorMichael Harding: In the old days everyone got a mug – apart from priests and high-ranking nunsWed Mar 07 2018 - 08:27
Michael Harding’s epic journey home: ‘I needed to see Leitrim’A flight from Warsaw to Liverpool, another to Cork diverted to Shannon and then a bus to Galway and another to Athlone . . .Fri Mar 02 2018 - 15:00
Michael Harding: I worry I’m the elephant in the roomEven though I walked a lot, it was doing me no good. Because every time I went out I ate moreWed Feb 28 2018 - 06:00
