Michael Harding: I could watch crows for hours. I see myself in them

I was on the balcony of a de-luxe hotel room in Kilkenny on the day the sun was eclipsed in March. And just beyond the balcony was a tree where two crows were harvesting dead twigs in their fierce beaks.

They would land, gather, and then fly off with a mouthful of forestry. Apparently crows start building nests around St Patrick’s Day. My mother used to light fires in all the rooms on Patrick’s Day to ensure that no crow would pick our chimney pots to start a new family in. There must be something in the sound of drunken Irish yahoos that frightens them, or the sight of humans dressed up in red wigs and green hats that reminds them it’s time to move on.

I kept a close eye on the crows in Kilkenny. I golloped down my prunes and scrambled eggs in five minutes at the breakfast table, just to get back to the balcony to watch what might happen when the skies darkened. By 9am it looked like a day in December, and the crows went mad. I suppose they didn’t know why it was getting dark; the poor creatures haven’t evolved far enough to conclude anything ontological about the nature of the universe. But their eyes bulged with fear and they began arguing with each other about the branches.

And then the sun returned and I saw in their big black eyes a sense of relief, although there was still something ferocious about their huge, grey beaks.

Crow-watching

I could watch crows for hours if there was time enough. I see an image of myself when I look at them. I know the savagery of the crow is buried in my psyche, and it manifests as rage when I meet an obstacle in life or don’t get my own way.

Sometimes I become sentimental about crows. I look at how they fly, how their heads move so fluidly and how beautifully they inhabit their bodies. I’m glad I’m not a worm or a field mouse when those black wings darken the grass.

I like being human, and so, when the eclipse was over and the sun returned, I went down into the lovely streets of Kilkenny, with no great purpose except to sit in a few restaurants drinking coffee and watching other humans. I even had a massage in the late afternoon in a darkened room, with candlelight and soft music, just to luxuriate in the sensation of being alive.

And I spent two more days on my balcony staring at the crow-black feathers and wondering why I was born a human and not a bird.

Dublin delight

On Sunday morning I checked out of the hotel before noon and headed for Dublin to begin rehearsals for a play. The promise of a few weeks in Dublin delighted me and if I had been any happier I would have sprouted wings.

Three hours later I took up residency in a tiny apartment in Rathmines, and in the evening I went strolling around the streets looking for duvets, sheets and a few groceries, but the shops were all closed.

So instead I walked into town, staring at the back of women’s heads, the shaved skulls of young men and the scarves that envelop Muslim women, and I listened to the delightful cacophony of different languages as pedestrians with headphones talked to phantoms in the air before them.

I was amazed at the amount of people dining at tables on the streets near the Powerscourt Centre. It wasn’t like that in my day, I thought. And then I saw an old ghost, standing in the doorway of Grogan’s pub, as radiant as she was 30 years ago, when we were both on bicycles and would wobble away into the night with little flasks of whiskey in our hip pockets. But it wasn’t her. It was just a young woman who looked like her.

So I went home to my little apartment and began studying the play, struggling to gather up the lines of each scene in my mouth like a crow with new twigs.

And it was funny that on Monday morning when we began to read the play, we came across a scene about birds. It’s a night scene where two men sit in a field talking about crows and wondering what crows do when they sit in a field.

“Do they talk their own language?” one character asks in the play.

“Who is to say,” the other character replies, “Who is to say?”

Rehearsals had begun. Michael Harding stars as The Bull McCabe in John B Keane's The Field at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, until the May 30th