Michael Harding: Hot tip for an old goat looking to spice up his love life

I was standing at the window of Hodges Figgis in Dublin recently and saw the full text of Sailing to Byzantium by Yeats in the window.

The older I get, the more I understand the poem. The unease of an old man, in a country where the young are slapping their delicious skins against each other in a frenzy of passion, and where he is nothing more than a tattered coat upon a stick.

I have great sympathy for Yeats, who went to such trouble to achieve sexual arousal, late in life, submitting himself to an exotic vasectomy in order to raise his libido. I’ve read accounts of him stalking a young woman at a public lecture, inveigling himself into her car and sitting with her for hours as she sang the praises of a younger man. That must have been sore on the old goat.

As I was thinking of Yeats I met the General further up the street and we walked around the corner in search of coffee and walnut cake, and I told him about my reflections on Yeats.

“Maybe he never heard of chillies,” the General suggested. “That’s the stuff that can awaken the libido into pulsating flesh.”

We were sitting in the sun at a restaurant table on the street.

I asked him how many chillies I would need to consume in order to get a libidinous buzz.

The use of chillies

“You don’t eat them,” he said dismissively. Then he leaned over the table to me so that no one could hear. He whispered his instructions for the use of chillies into my ear, and then leaned back in his seat, his eyebrows extending half way up his forehead.

I laughed.

“No laughing matter,” he said. “I got the advice in Arizona during July from a medicine man; a long-haired white Caucasian who was wearing more turquoise rings and necklaces than an extra in a John Wayne movie. Nevertheless he had a PhD in sexual therapy.”

“What were you doing in Arizona?”

“Visiting the children.”

“You don’t have children in America.”

“That’s beside the point,” he replied. “But I did meet a wonderful young lady who practises shamanic healing in Phoenix. It was 35 in the shade and she said I should go see the medicine man because of my problem. The medicine man turned out to be from California.

“When I came back with the chillies, she asked me did I want to try them and I said yes. And before I knew it I could feel a sensation in my groin like a rod of lightning. In fact, the only problem was that the pain became so intense we had to cancel coitus for the evening and she got little bottles of iced water from the fridge to cool me down.”

The waitress came to take our order, a slim woman with dark hair.

Farewell to salad days

“The Caesar salad looks good,” I said to the General.

“I thought you said we were going to have walnut cake,” he protested.

“Oh, we have walnut cake also,” the waitress said.

“The salad would be healthier,” I said.

“Walnut cake,” the General insisted, pouting at me, and so I agreed. When it arrived, we ate it with spoons and the General continued on the subject of Arizona for a long time, singing the praises of various therapies he had been lured into during the summer.

Then he remembered he was meeting someone at the Abbey Theatre at 7pm.

“Chillies,” he whispered as he stood up to go. “Chillies are the secret that Yeats never found.”

“Enjoy the theatre,” I said.

“There’s more to life than Caesar salads,” he snapped, as he turned on his heel and walked away, with his chest puffed out like a pigeon and his rear end trailing behind him.

When he was gone, I sat with the dregs of my coffee until the waitress came to clear the table. Suddenly, the phone in her pocket rang and she dashed into the street to answer it. But she looked sad when she put the little phone to her ear. I suspect it was her lover on the other end. She listened most of the time, apart from a few interjections.

“Yes.”

“I see.”

“I understand.”

“Well that’s okay.”

Then she replaced the phone in the pocket of her apron and with a sense of quiet dejection went back inside the restaurant, without even remembering to take the empty plates from which the General and I had recently gorged on walnut cake.