Driven to the drink by a cat-and-mouse conversation

An old friend's Zen-like calm is not what's required when the heating doesn't work, your pet's using your computer and you're trying to quit the booze, writes MICHAEL HARDING

THE REASON I love the Royal Canal is because it is a refuge for people who are weary of the world. Amid the falling leaves, old couples hold hands, while other individuals push buggies, jog, or walk dogs.

Every so often someone ends their life in the waters of the canal, and yet, for every person who dies by their own hand, there must be hundreds of other people who don’t; people who go to the edge and turn back; people who have walked along the leafy banks and been healed by the soothing presence of that other space which opens out before us when we stand alone with nature.

Occasionally I go for a stroll with a retired teacher, a tall, big-boned old gent, who exudes the equanimity of a Zen monk.

I phoned him during the week to say I had given up the drink. He said: “You’re the fourth person who has told me that since August – it must be the recession.”

I said: “But I’m left with too much energy, and I don’t know what to do with it. I’m up at dawn, hoovering, and cleaning toilets, and rearranging the furniture. I’m up and down a ladder to the attic like a yo-yo.”

He said that’s dangerous.

I said: “The central heating is not working – someone needs to fix it.” He said: “Probably the radiators just need to be bled.” He came around and we sat in the kitchen, drinking tea, as the cat watched us.

I confided in him that the cat uses the computer.

I said: “I suspect she uses it while I’m in bed.”

“How do you know?”

I said: “She hijacked my Facebook page, and put her own picture up on it, and wrote a little cat message to all my friends.”

“Perhaps it was a mouse,” he suggested. “A mouse might have taken the photograph and put it on Facebook to frame the cat.”

I said: “That’s impossible. A mouse wouldn’t know the password.”

“And does the cat know it?”

I said: “She always watches me when I’m typing.”

He gazed out the window for a long while.

“You need to change your password,” he said.

Neither of us had the foggiest notion how to bleed a radiator, but we poked and tapped and twisted, like we were two plumbers on an oil rig.

There was a little screw at the top of each radiator and when it was opened a puff of air came out. We went around the entire house opening these valves, but when I flicked the switch, there was just a gurgle of water and no heat whatsoever.

I was getting angry with the radiators, but my friend has a Zen-like ability to detach himself from the world of politics, work, the rearing of children, or the idiosyncrasies of a central-heating system. He suggested we abandon the project, and “go for a drive”.

I said: “I haven’t heard anyone talk about going for a drive in decades. That’s something people used to do when there was absolutely nothing else to do; when cars were parked in hay-sheds to keep them dry, and people took flasks of tea and baskets of tomato sandwiches to wet beaches.”

Going for a drive is something my parents used to do. The neighbours did it. John McGahern’s father did it. People in remote mountains did it. Even when they intended to visit a neighbour in hospital, or go to the cinema in Carrick-on-Shannon, they never admitted that they had a plan, they just said “let’s go for a drive!”, and then, as if by accident, they would find themselves in Carrick-on- Shannon and they’d say: “Oh look, there’s the cinema, sure we might as well see what’s on.”

And then they’d say: “Ah well, that looks like a good film. We might as well go in, since we’re here.”

My mother’s Ford Escort once ended up in the car park of a psychiatric hospital.

“What are you doing, Mammy?” I asked.

“I’m just turning.”

“Mammy! Isn’t that where poor Mrs Reilly is, with the nerves?”

“It is indeed,” she said. “Sure we might as well go in and say hello.”

The Zen master repeated his offer.

“A drive in the country might help you to relax.”

I said: “No! Absolutely not!”

“Well, mind yourself,” he said, kindly, as he left the building.

I changed my password on Facebook, and headed for the Canal, alone.