THE has trekked and climbed at 21,500 feet in the Himalaya as well as having years of experience walking the Yorkshire Dales and along England's 270 mile backbone, the Pennines. Yet Mike Harding, writer, walker - "I'm a walker, well a high altitude walker and trekker, rather than a crag rat" - stand up comic, photographer and campaigner, claims he has never encountered any rain quite like the persistent, penetrative, infiltrative form unique to Ireland.
As the gentle May showers continue to flood playing pitches, rot plants and sustain an intimidating snail army, "Irish rain reaches places other rain doesn't, it falls down and also manages to climb up", Harding came to Ireland to promote his new book, Footloose in the West of Ireland.
The book presents a non sentimental, non romanticised and healthily non gimmicky view of the west. Bord Failte should simply employ him and allow him licence to promote Ireland his way. And for those who might wonder why an Englishman is writing an intimate travel book about the west, they should quickly think again.
After all, Ireland already owes a huge debt to another Englishman, Tim Robinson, whose maps of Aran, Connemara and the Burren as well as his scholarly, reflective writings have filled a major gap in Irish cultural and heritage literature.
A professed admirer of Robinson, Harding chooses a more conversational but similarly detailed and anecdotal approach. His opinions on the need to preserve the landscape and limit the construction of often unnecessary interpretative centres are well known - he actively campaigned against the building of a centre at Mullaghmore and also opposed the one at Dunquin, "the battle we lost".
While he loves the landscape, his personal response to it is quite intellectual, less conversational than his writing. References and cross references dominate his observations. I met Tim Robinson about seven years ago. First of all, he learnt the language so he could understand the landscape. Then he invented these cerebral maps, depicting two worlds - the surface world of lime stone, rocks and rivers and then the subtext, the linguistic world that lies underneath like a narrative. I'll give you an example. Near Roundstone, there's a tiny island, with large boulders leading to it. The local people call them (the boulders) they re very big you can't miss them, Steip Na Peilears (the policeman's steps). The locals used to make position on the island, but only at high tide when the boulders were concealed and the police, the peelers couldn't get out. Tim found all that out."
ACCORDING to Harding, Robinson's maps act as a geographical marker leading towards the stories beneath. "He rediscovered the gloss, the language and narrative underneath. His maps are like reading a book."
Returning to the subject of Mullaghmore, Harding finds it difficult to conceal his exasperation: "Why on earth could the OPW justify turning that wonderful place into a massive theme park. I know," he stresses, "that they know that the sort of people who need coffee shops and toilets to draw them to places like the Burren aren't really interested. It's all very cynical on the part of the OPW." Reiterating the views he gives in the book, he says: "If people have to have an interpretative centre, then let them build it in Corrofin or Kilfenora, in an established village, not in the very beating heart of the land. Let people come, but let them walk, let them find their own way and not be led around by some bored tour coach driver.
In fairness though, he applauds the OPW's work at the Ceide Fields in Mayo and also at Clonmacnoise, where the three high crosses, including the magnificent Cross of the Scriptures, are now housed inside the interpretative centre and replicas stand outside in their place. "Not everything that the OPW has done is completely terrible."
Small, with a heavy walrus moustache and round glasses, Harding looks a bit like a hippy. He wears an earring and a denim waistcoat but initially seems far more jaunty than he actually is. Aside from his friendliness and his ability to strike up an instant conversation with anyone about anything and his strong Manchester accent, one of the more obvious things about him is his organisation and the depth of his observations. One liners are delivered with ease, as are the anecdotes, but while he has a reputation for being able to survive the longest and most demanding of post performance music and drinking sessions he is ultimately a serious man, a thinker in love with historical, archaeological and geological explanations, such as being aware of the subtleties of the correct use of Himalaya (singular) rather than the commonly inaccurate Himalayas (plural): Himalaya means the abode of the gods. There is nothing vague or random about him, Harding has mastered the art of relaxed deliberation.
As part of his book promotion tour, he has compiled a 20 minute film based on slides of photographs used in the book, accompanied by a soundtrack of traditional music and no voice over. He lets the pictures and the faces of the people he has photographed provide the narrative. A technician has driven over from England with the equipment, the sound system is quite sophisticated. Nothing is left to chance.
Within minutes of concluding a radio interview, he is discussing Joyce, Heaney's poetry "which I loved since reading the very first one, Death of a Naturalist, in 66. He's absolute magic" and Harding's great literal hero, John Dos Passos. Harding sees I land's landscape as a many layered text and his enthusiasm is not recent, "I have been coming here for 33 years since I was 18. I know the country pretty well and the language wellish. There's two things I have tried very hard in life to learn the Irish language and the uilleann pipes. I know I'll never learn the pipes - it's like wrestling with an angry octopus with adenoidal problems. But as for my love of Ireland - it's a combination of things; the people, the language, the music, stories, the quality of the light - especially in the west - the wonderful, watery light. You know the paintings of Paul Henry. He captures the light so well."
Many of Harding's photographs in the book are dark and moody, catching the darkness of Connemara's haging skies. He knew there was no point in standing around trying to get those bland blue skies and fluffy white cloud shots so beloved of holiday postcard makers. "A. - as you know, they're just not typical of the place and B. - in Ireland, you could be waiting forever for a blue sky, never mind the fluffy white clouds.
He says his people on his mother's side came from the tenements up behind St Stephen's Green. I grew up in an Irish Catholic ghetto in Manchester. Being Catholic as well as Irish meant you were different twice over." In common with another Mancunian, the late Anthony Burgess, Harding has no sense of Englishness. "Mind you, Burgess did leave. I didn't. I'm completely without any sense of nationality. I hate nationalism for all the violence and destruction it has caused. If anything I'd see myself as straddling two worlds between a past which is rooted in a country I've never lived in and a present which takes me from a home I really enjoy in the Yorkshire Dales, to places like Nepal and India." Home is a stone house built on the side of a hill in 1726. "There has been a house on this site since 1505." The view overlooks a landscape very like west Kerry.
"My father was English, but he died exactly four weeks to the day before I was born in 1944. He was a Lancaster bomber and his plane was shot down over Holland - coming back from a raid over Germany. My mother became a bride, a widow and a mother all in the space of one year." For most of his life Harding's father was little more to him than a man in a photograph. He finally visited his father's grave in Holten, between Maastricht and Amsterdam when he was 50. But a few years before that, he was approached one night after a concert by a man who told him he could show him the aerodrome his father had flown from. It was Bardney, in Lincolnshire. It was very emotional for him. I think it meant that by the time I visited his grave I had finally done my grieving. Icarus Daedalus, a memorium poem to the father he never met, which appears in Daddy Edgar's Pools (1992), describes his visit to the long deserted airfield: "I heard the birds of Lincolnshire call in the dawn/ As young men ill with fear made landfall from. The sea of howling night, small boys sat on/ Fat cushions piloting the death birds home./ Now twice your age, I stand where you stood then,/ On broken slabs of concrete where bright mats/ Of airfield weed are moving in ... Still place of birds, and nothing changes but that you,/ A ghost, walked here my Icarus, my Daedalus,/ My father now my son.
Harding's maternal great grandmother, Mary Ellen O'Neill, was the dominate presence throughout his boyhood. "She kept us all together. My grandmother in fact, she had run off. Vanished, disappeared into the mists of time. She and my grandfather spilt up. Unheard of in those days. But he was living in Liverpool with another woman. My mother was working, so my great grandmother raised me. Although she lived in England, she never really left Ireland. The Manchester Irish Catholic community was enormous. The influence on me of both forces, Irish and Catholic, was tremendous. That sense of otherness, of being apart, just grew." He was the first child, although his mother, Eileen Pyne, later remarried a Polish soldier in 1951 and she had a further three children. "I was very protective of them, my youngest brother is only a year older than my eldest daughter."
HARDING admits that his life has been fairly trauma free. "My great grandmother was my greatest loss. She raised me. Her death was the worst thing, no watching her die was the worst thing. She was 96 and had been bed ridden for 18 months. Up until then she was very active. Then she just prepared to die, she went out and bought herself a shroud and waited. It was so pathetic. But I've been lucky so far, aside from her, all the people close to me are well. My mother's only 70 and she's very funny, often unintentionally, I get a lot of material for my column from her."
Many would know him as a stand up comic, singer and all round entertainer, but his collection Daddy Edgar's Pools was well reviewed while the reviewer in the TLS decided Harding's stories, The Virgin at the Disco (1994) rediscovered the art of narrative". Hypnotising The Cat, a compilation of his weekly column for The Manchester Evening News, was published last year and he continues to write the column. As well as his travel books, Walking The Dales (1986), Footloose in the Himalaya (1989) and Walking The Peak and Pennines (1992). "I see myself as first and foremost a writer, but in England It is very difficult to do more than one thing well. In France, it's no big deal. But in England, if you become well known doing one thing, that's your lot then. I'll always be a stand up comic. I still tour with my one man show, Stand Up And Be Comic about every 18 months, it helps fund my travelling."
Britain's literary community have been quicker to accept Harding as one of them, and two days ago he read his poetry and fiction at the Hay On Wye Festival, one of Britain's most famous performance literary events.
Still comedy made his name. That career began about 1967, "I was doing stand up routines in clubs while a university student, I'd gone to college late, when I was 23, a maturish student. But by that time I had two children, so my earnings were useful as a way of supplementing my student grant."
On finishing his degree in education, he became a professional, full time stand up comic in 1971, "25 years ago, a long, long time ago". He does not seem to regret the six years spent digging roads, scaling industrial cleaners or working in factories, "I did all kinds of jobs." When he left grammar school at 18, he was already sure that he would be a writer, "I'd been writing since I was a kid and had been given my first instrument at seven."
By 1984 at the time of the miners' strike, he was well established as a leading stand up comic and gave concerts throughout Britain in aid of the miners. His narrative based comedy is observational, "the gags are long stories, comic tales, quite surreal . . Mainly based on childhood. I think coming to things from a child's eye we get a pretty food idea of the mess we have made of things. I'm never didatic, but I'm very political and I try to be funny."
Critical of the new trends in comedy he says, alternative comedy. What does that mean? Alternative to what? To comedy?
Comedy is becoming more bitter and more savage. It is not reflecting the world, it is merely reflecting the small, sad, angry world of these sad young men. That laddish, loutish type of comedy. Comedy should be subversive, but it should also be inclusive.". The late Leonard Rossiter, star of two of Britain's finest ever classic comedy series The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin and Rising Damp, "he was a genius, a total original" - John Cleese and Les Dawson are among the comedians he most admires. "I'm also a fan of Rory Bremner, I think he's great. But Dawson, he was superb, often very surreal. It's still hard to believe he's dead."
Supporting the miners did have its repercussions, "I eventually became aware that I had not been invited to reappear on BBC. While I've done a lot of radio, it's been a long time since I was on that TV channel.
In spite of Blair, Harding remains a Labour supporter. "I liked Kinnock. But it's more important that we get the Bloody Tories' out, instead of bickering amongst ourselves."
In July he sets off for a three month journey through Pakistan, Nepal and India. And is already planning a book, Across The Karakorum, based on his travels. Married for over 30 years, Harding's wife Pat often accompanies him on his trips and they have two grown daughters. He is happy with his life without being oppressively ecstatic and has managed to achieve most of the things he set out to do - aside that is from mastering the uilleann pipes or becoming fluent in Irish. A new volume of poetry, Crystal Set Dreams is due out in November as is The King of Rome, a new album. And if the BBC has either forgotten or chooses to ignore Mike Harding as a maverick militant, he has not forgotten the beleagured mine workers whose traditional way of life was killed off by cost cutting, modernisation and closure of uneconomic pits. One of the tracks on the album, Miners in the Rain, pays tribute to two men who stood outside Harding's Manchester office collecting for the miners.
