From the banks of the Royal Canal to the Congo

Displaced in Mullingar:  He may have shown an early aptitude for music, but it was a gift from an uncle that set Michael Harding on the writing road

Walking along the canal bank this morning I saw a male blackbird, on top of an ash tree. The ash tree was leafless, except for the overwhelming fold of ivy strangling it to death. The blackbird sang with a mellow ease, and a hen played around on the lower branches. Below the tree, the green blades of flag iris were already a foot out of the water, and small flies were beginning to buzz on the still surface.

I stood there for a moment, grateful to be alive, and then returned to the apartment to type up a few notes. Elizabeth Bishop once said that she was not convinced about creative-writing courses. "The only thing you can give a young person who wants to be a writer," she said, "is a typewriter."

My Uncle Oliver gave me my first one when I was 14, and he gave me a diagram with the home keys, and in a few weeks I could type with both hands, all fingers, and no eyes.

I used three typewriters in Bombay 10 years ago to write a film that never got made. I had a large apartment to the north of the city, overlooking the Indian Ocean, and when I was presented with the first typewriter, there were keys missing. The second day they came with another one, but the barrel was jammed.

The third one worked. Everyone was pleased. People stood around the room, or on the balcony, gazing at me through the glass, or staring into the ocean. They listened to me typing words, as if I was using a sewing machine to make pyjamas. When Jay, the producer, arrived, he said that he could hear the typewriter singing.

I heard Colm Wilkinson singing one night in the Lakeland Hotel in Cavan just before he became famous. In those days the law required that food be served with late-night drink, so at 1.30am the bar closed for 10 minutes, a slit in the wall opened, and a lady with a white nylon coat flung out 100 chicken legs on paper plates. It was called chicken in the rough.

And rough it certainly was. I felt sorry for Colm Wilkinson and other musicians who had to endure those circuits, where half-starved drunks scoffed the bones like dogs, as the swill of drink flooded the floor beside the bar, and caused eejits to slip on their way to the toilets.

I too was a musician. In primary school I was in a tin-whistle band. We marched up the main street of Belturbet on Fleadh days, with uniforms of blue, and little caps not unlike those worn by the United States Air Force , and we would play The Dawning of the Day, as we marched in fours, through the drizzle.

At the front was the staff master, who carried a flag. At the rear was a big drum, which kept time between tunes. We always knew when to stop because the drummer would shout "Halt!" We'd stop there in the pouring rain at the front of the courthouse, and play The Mountains of Mourne, in waltz time. We were very versatile.

Then the drummer would move us off again - "By the left, quick, march!" - and we went back down the hill.

My fingers danced on the whistle, and the droplets of rain trickled to the edge of my nose, as I dreamed of other worlds.

There was a bar in Belturbet called the Yukon. And there was a bar in Cavan called The Congo. I was never in either. But they were exotic names, when I was 10, and I didn't distinguish between the word and the reality.

I knew the Yukon was a river, in the snow, where heroes went on horses to sift for gold and shoot each other, because I had learned that much from John Wayne in plain black and white, on the television.

When someone said Jamsey Reilly was scuttered in the Congo last night, I got an image of Jamsey in the jungle, having an uncomfortable bowel motion.

I could never distinguish between the name of a thing, and its real presence; between the word on the page and the lovely reality behind the word.

I have always lived in the memory of a thing, rather than in the initial experience. Which is why, at this moment, I am sitting on my balcony in Mullingar, savouring the song of this morning's blackbird, on the banks of the Royal Canal.