Michael Harding: Sometimes it seems as if all the world is sleeping

Sometimes nobody calls for days. But you can’t complain if you live in the hills. We’re all isolated up here. I have neighbours scattered around the mountain who live alone and are stuck in bed because of one ailment or another. We all look out our windows at the same autumn sky over the lake.

I was lying in bed one morning in early November with nobody beside me, so I turned on the radio. I think my neighbours would be big fans of RTÉ, but I prefer Radio 3, and Jeanette Winterson was being interviewed.

She’s a wonderful writer, and she was talking about how doctors give too many antidepressants to young teenagers to block them from feeling forlorn or sad, meaning that they don’t fully experience their own lives.

Fair play to you, Jeanette, I thought, as I leaped up in the bed, because it’s a point close to my own heart. Winterson has a beautiful voice, and I felt good just listening to her.

It was one of those autumn days when the leaves had not yet fallen but were thinned out to a speckle of rust and yellow on every tree. I imagined the badgers and hedgehogs were all sleeping somewhere, using their own breath in the stillness underground, like a compass to sort out the universe.

Used bath towel

I could have listened to Jeanette Winterson all day, but it was a very brief interview. So I got up and brushed my teeth, used the toilet and lifted the dirty towels from the bathroom floor and put them in the laundry basket, because there’s one thing that brings sorrow to any heart and that’s the sight of a used bath towel lying on the floor. Keeping the place tidy is not easy in winter, and so I don’t bother much with housework.

I often sit at the kitchen table and allow the wintery light to seep into my bones and soak my mind with a swampy melancholy.

And I worry about porridge. Each morning I anguish about it. Would a bowl of it see me through until lunchtime? Or would it do for me what nuts did for the squirrel, and I’d be lying with a fat belly at the stove all morning instead of writing?

I usually opt for the porridge, and then walk in the garden. The ash is bare. The beeches are still coppery but well-thinned. And a large bowl of porridge invariably induces sleep by the stove for an hour or two, and sometimes not even a finch bothers with the feeder outside the window. It seems as if all the world is sleeping and the garden is full of withering things.

Solitude smashed

One morning I had a visitor. It was a neighbour. He came around the gable as if from nowhere. At first he was just a formless shadow moving across the window pane, a dark overcoat, like a giant crow, and then he slid the glass door open and suddenly it was as if a savage God had arrived into my little solitude and smashed it to pieces.

“I just came to tell you that your phone is not working,” he said. I hadn’t tried it.

“How do you know?” I wondered.

“There’s three poles fallen on the road up,” he said. “And the phone line is lying along the ditch.”

Clearly this was an enormous event.

“What happened?” I wondered.

“A crane hire truck,” he said in a whisper. “It was coming up the road last night and took three poles, one after another. We only have the landline. And now it’s gone.”

He might as well have been speaking of the Titanic going down.

“That is terrible news,” I said.

“Someone would need to phone Eircom,” he said bluntly. And only then did I realise why he had come. So I dialled the number with my mobile.

“It’s Eir they call it now,” I said as the phone rang out. “And do you know why?”

“No,” he replied.

“Because when you call them they leave you hanging in the air,” I said, as I held the phone towards him so that he could listen to the automated gobbledegook.

But the silence of my morning had been broken. My gossamer link with the sleeping badgers at the foot of the garden had been shattered. There would be no more dreaming for me now. Not until the morrow.