Michael Harding: A London crow spoke bleakly from his perch by the bar

I was reading Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes one afternoon, enjoying the savage and mythic ferocity of the terrifying poems, which open the poet's private life like a claw, releasing their energy only to decay.

There's nothing pretty about the remembrance of his scorching encounter with the life of Sylvia Plath. The poems in Birthday Letters often feel like songs woven from the entrails of a modern Heathcliff.

I was watching crows from the safety of my studio, with the stove red hot and the winter sky darkening, as clouds covered the mountain and Lough Allen, a lake where Ted Hughes once fished for pike with the artist Barrie Cooke. The water had gone choppy with white waves. The twilight was thickening with so many ghosts that I sensed it might be a good idea to turn on the television and “lighten up”, as the General might say. But there was no booze in the house.

A little later I was walking through a local village when I saw a woman at the door of the pub across the street. I knew immediately that she was the owner from the way she stood, and I knew that she was looking about the street because there was no one inside. If you live long enough in the country, you become like a god: you can predict everything before it happens, except of course for the Lotto numbers.

Wine and Fargo

I sensed that the woman saw me as I was taking money from the ATM. My intention was to get a bottle of wine in the Mace shop, go home and watch Fargo.

There was something connecting us, though, even across the street, without us even having to look at one another. I knew she was there and she knew I was there and years ago, when I was a vagabond, I often drank in her pub. So instead of getting the wine, I crossed the empty street and walked into her shop and ordered a pint of cider. Just for old times’ sake.

She had fled from the door as I crossed and she was standing behind the bar as I arrived. We expressed delight to see one another, and she poured the cider and then took a mug of tea and came out into the lounge and placed herself on an armchair close to the open fire.

“It’s better than standing behind the counter when there’s no one to serve,” she said. In fact there was one other customer, a man from London whose parents came from Sligo.

“I work on the buildings,” he said, “and it’s quiet this time of year, so I just got the notion to come home for a week.”

He sat on a high stool savouring a pint of Guinness. The clock was ticking. The sound of a girl laughing seeped in from the street. The man from London winced.

“It’s quiet,” he said, ruefully.

“It’s always quiet in Leitrim,” I said. “That’s the beauty of it.”

Swivel chair

The London man noticed that the chair the woman was sitting on could swivel. It was more like an office chair.

“Where did you get the chair?” he asked.

“In the car boot sale in Carrick,” she replied.

The sound of girls’ laughter seeped in again from the faraway street.

“What do you do?” the man asked as he turned to me.

“I’m a writer,” I said.

He paused.

“Is that a stressful job?” he wondered.

“Not always,” I said, and then confessed that sometimes I just sit and look out the window at the birds for hours.

“What birds?” he wondered.

“Crows,” I said. “And magpies.”

He seemed bewildered.

“I suppose every man has to find his own way,” he said with a kind of grimace.

He looked like a crow and the woman at the fire reminded me of a wren.

“It’s not easy,” he said bleakly, as he buttoned his coat and began to leave.

“No,” I agreed. “It’s not.”

When he was gone I asked the landlady did she know him.

“Never seen him before,” she said. “Just landed from England. The first evening he came in he said he was on his way to Sligo, but then he came in the second night again. And now he comes in every evening around at the same time, has a pint and heads off.”

“He’s a rare bird,” I said.

“That he is,” she agreed, smiling at me from where she was wrapped in her blanket on the swivelling armchair by the fire, as cosy as a wren in its nest.