It's a year since I fell into depression

I remember a wise man telling me one time that the human soul is like water; we must allow ourselves to be poured from one vessel into another, and from one nightmare into the next

I WAS ON THE train last week and there was a businesswoman in the seat in front of me, with Brown Thomas bags, a leather briefcase and a fancy phone. She was talking to someone about cash flow and staffing levels and balance sheets.

And then she said, “Could you do me a huge favour?” There was a pause.

“There’s a dress designer in Germany,” she said, “and I need the number.” She mentioned the name of the designer and thanked her minion, and in a few minutes he called back and she wrote something with a pen. Then she called Germany in a BBC voice.

“I’m looking at a dress in Hello! magazine,” she said, “and I want it, and it has your label on it.” The person in Germany must have obliged her, because after a pause she said, “Well, I’ll leave it all in your capable hands. If you can trace it and get it to me, it doesn’t matter where it has to come from. Call this number when you have it. Thank you.” She hadn’t wasted a second of her time and just as she finished we stopped in Mullingar and she skipped off, probably to a fancy 4x4 in the car park. I envied her competence. All I do on the train is stare out the window at the drizzle.

It’s one year since I fell into depression, but I’m almost out of the woods, as the General says.

I still brood a lot, get transfixed by nothing in particular, and find myself staring at a wall or a tree in the garden for hours.

That’s why I’m safer on the train than in the 4x4. I was driving from Carrick-on-Shannon last week behind a hearse with Donegal registration plates and a fine coffin of oak in the rear. It was going slow but I didn’t want to overtake. There’s something in me that resists rushing past a corpse; in this case it was probably an elderly bachelor from London, I supposed, on his way home to Donegal. I was just speculating, and daydreaming, and I wasn’t wearing glasses, so when a digger came out on the road from a field and the hearse banged on the brakes, I nearly ran the snout of my Pajero into the rear end of whoever was stretched in the coffin.

The glasses went missing on the holiday weekend. They fell into a barrel while I was filling a watering can for a neighbour’s radishes. I leaned into the barrel to find them but couldn’t see anything below the surface of the water. So I leaned my entire body over the barrel in order to block the light and see better, but still I could see only my own reflection.

I remember a wise man telling me one time that the human soul is like water; we must allow ourselves to be poured from one vessel into another, and from one nightmare into the next. And I do spend hours looking into water, in bog holes or lakes, wondering about consciousness, so the barrel had some allure for me.

In fact I was so absorbed that I didn’t notice the postman trying without success to stuff an Amazon delivery through the neighbour’s letterbox. And he was looking in my direction as if he didn’t often see a man with his backside in the wind and his head in a barrel.

“I’m just looking for my glasses,” I said. And then I explained that the woman of the house had gone to London for the queen’s jubilee, and that her radishes and lettuces needed attention. She keeps them indoors, in a little plastic greenhouse she bought at Lidl and which gets blown down every time there’s a moderate wind.

I spoke to her on Skype later to tell her I had the Amazon delivery. She and her friends were at a street party, where brash young women around her were waving big gaudy knickers made from Union Jacks.

She told me they had been in the city to watch the flotilla on the Thames, with some swanky looking military man, whom I saw hovering in the background of the Skype connection.

“It was a glittering pageant,” she said. “Very colourful.” “That’s wonderful,” I said. When we disconnected I stood at the window looking into the grey lake as dark rain clouds gathered, and without my glasses the sad windy face of Leitrim was all blurred around me.

As the General says, “No wonder the Irish are depressed.”