Michael Harding: The unbearable bittern-ness of being

The house is empty. But I am happy to boil my eggs in silence and make watery tea in a single mug, because solitude is a strange pleasure.

I have a full tank of oil to keep the house warm, so I wont be found slumped in an armchair with a rug around my shoulders like I was last year when the General chastised me for neglecting myself.

He phoned on Sunday from outside Paris.

“In the name of God, how did you get over there?” I wondered.

“In the Citroën C3,” he declared. “I decided to drive until it ran out of juice, and here I am.”

I could hear a woman giggling in the background but he didn’t offer further information.

“I’m alone,” I said. “The Beloved is gone to Poland. She left from Cavan.”

“I didn’t know Ryanair had flights from there,” he remarked.

I explained that there are buses from Cavan to Dublin Airport.

Young people falling around

She got on the bus in Cavan at 3am two weeks ago and waved goodbye from the window.

The bus hadn’t even pulled out when I got the urge to drive around the town, which was still busy with revellers from the previous night. Young people were falling around and climbing lamp-posts, and tumbling in and out of chippers and kebab joints; women hardly able to balance on their high heels, and men in trousers slung so low on their hips that I could see tattoos on their arses.

It was as if for one brief moment the streets belonged to them. I sensed a pent-up rage in some of their faces, as if for the rest of their lives they might be forced to kowtow to the ruling classes, to the priests and solicitors and policemen and all the other educated middle classes who drive big cars and go early to bed in the suburbs; but this, it seemed, was their moment.

The following morning I drove back to Arigna. When I got as far as Lough Meelagh, I decided to go for a walk in the woods where the bitterns live.

When I was a boy, there was an old man who reminded me of a bittern. He had a long nose, and, even when he was crossing the yard, he walked like he was wading through mud, in slow motion, with his neck stretched and his long nose reaching into the distance before him. To me, he was a magical bird who appeared every Friday afternoon, when I was reading the Beano in my mother's Austin A40, as we parked behind his farmhouse to collect a chicken for the Sunday pot.

But last year was the first time in my life I actually heard the bittern boom. It happened on the shores of Lough Meelagh. It sounded like a deep and delicate percussion instrument, in the woods beside the shoreline; and although he was hidden, I knew he was very close, a real presence vibrating through the air all around me.

An Bonnán Buí

When Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna saw the bittern in the early 18th century, the bird was dead and stretched on ice. At least that's according to his poem An Bonnán Buí. But I suppose Cathal Buí was projecting his own desperate bewilderment on to the world around him, when he saw his bird so derelict. I know from my therapy sessions it is always a projection of our own self that is thrown on to the world as a shadow to attend us.

But my bittern was invisible. It was just a sound, like a plucked string in the fingers of some divinity. I don’t look for God either inside the universe or outside it. But the world around me is always on fire with being that can only be contained in myth.

I walked for an hour around the lake. As I came out of the woods, I saw Turlough O’Carolan sitting at the water’s edge between two swans.

“You’re looking well,” he said.

“And as light as feathers,” I replied.

“Nothing like a walk by the lake to clear the head,” he declared.

“I thought you were buried in the cemetery on the other shore,” I said.

“Not at all,” he replied. “I still swim in the lake. A solitary life, but I have the bittern to comfort me when I’m distressed.”

I was going to ask him did he ever try therapy, but I decided not to.

“My house is empty,” I said. “If you’d care for a drink.”

And the old blind bird smiled as we walked together towards my new Mitsubishi.