Michael Harding: I'm as confused about masculinity as my cat

I was at a wedding recently. The bride wore a yellow dress, and a garland of freshly picked flowers, and after the ceremony she walked through an orchard with her groom, as friends straggled behind them with champagne flutes; everyone in procession towards the river bank, to toast the newly weds, under the sacred oak trees, beside the water’s edge.

Most of the guests were young, but for emotional security I clung to the older folk. We hobbled behind, at a distance; an old brigade of aunts and uncles, old soldiers, dazed clowns, retired teachers, the hard of hearing, and other afflicted old dolls. And we indulged ourselves in memories of other weddings long ago, when we too had energy to dance all night.

Everyone agreed that the bride was beautiful; a fact that made our eyes water as we shuffled around a white marquee with paper plates of roasted pork, and later tried to dance, despite our frozen hips, and bottles of oxygen, and the walking sticks that were so essential earlier in the sunlight.

Young people talk a lot, but as age creeps up on me I’m less inclined to open my mouth, even about serious issues like Brexit or the Eighth Amendment.

When I was young, flesh pots were few and far between in Cavan

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‘The flute in my hand, I got on the treadmill like a true Orange Man’

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Why I gave up cardigans for waistcoats - Michael Harding returns

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I still gaze at the beloved as she sleeps and see a stranger

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There is something graceful about leaving the future in the hands of the young. And the turning wheel of the universe will not stop turning just because I have grown old.

The only thing I need to do for young people, I remind myself, is to trust them, and have the common sense not to trample on their dreams.

Which unfortunately is something I’m always doing.

I saw a neighbour’s child in the pet food aisle in Tescos one day. He was stacking packs of cat food in his basket.

“You look happy.”

“They’re only €4 for six,” he said. His basket was overflowing.

I looked at the shelf and noticed that he had read the wrong label. The “special offer”, was out of date.

He was stunned.

“That’s amazing,” he whispered.

“It’s easy to make that mistake,” I said, realising he was embarrassed.

Then to my regret he put all the food back on the shelf and walked down the aisle with just one single can in his basket and his tail between his legs, and I feared that once again I might have trampled on something delicate or crushed something beautiful.

I knew a boy like him before. A sensitive boy who cherished cats in the unconscious fog of early adolescence before finding romance in eye shadow and the gothic melancholy of lace trimmed shirts. But that’s another story.

At Electric Picnic in September I saw his ghost again, in fields drenched with soft rain, where young men stumbled about in open-hearted joy, and women in short pants and painted faces danced around them.

I was participating in a panel discussion on “masculinity” with heroes from the world of sport. I don’t know what exactly I was supposed to be doing in the company of three athletic warriors, because to be truthful, I’m as confused about masculinity as my cat; and my cat is a sorry sight whenever some neighbouring queen comes around the yard, and pushes herself in his face, and sticks her bum in the air like she was expecting a helicopter of Toms to descend on her from on high. But at least his confusion has a cause. He was doctored. I, on the other hand, being fully intact, have no such excuse for the fog in my head regarding masculinity.

But at Electric Picnic the audience listened politely to the panel of men, as the sound from the main stage swallowed most of what we said.

Pontificating about masculinity was so stressful that when I went to leave the field afterwards I couldn’t find the exit. I walked around the Picnic stands and stalls among thousands of young revellers in the dark, until I panicked and eventually the guards came to rescue me.

A quiet solid guard in middle age, as confident in his masculinity as something chiselled from Kilkenny marble.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said.

“I feel I am a ghost,” I replied. “And certainly I’m lost.”

He looked around at the girls in short pants, and the stumbling boys.

“Aren’t we all lost?” he remarked, smiling.

He was accompanied by a woman in uniform, her tiny spectacled face overshadowed by the rim of her large Garda hat.

Eventually they found my carpark. And I strolled towards my Yeti with enormous relief. As if I had just escaped. But from what, I couldn’t say.