Sir, – I had always passed over Michael Harding’s columns up to until now. However, his piece entitled “Lace in the launderette, languor in the laburnums” (Summer Living, July 3rd) caught my eye, and I’m glad it did. Like all the best lyricists, he managed to infuse the prosaic with a lovely, wistful, poignant quality that, oddly enough, cheered me up on (yet another) glum Irish summer’s day.
What intrigued me most and which he left hanging, was the fleeting mention of a “long ago, mid-summer fling” in Donegal with the “college girl from Galway with sandy hair parted in the middle and large ice-blue eyes” who glanced at him and “changed his world forever”. Who was she? His future wife? A fleeting, doomed love affair?
Like so much in his vignette, this episode had an elegiac feel to it which hinted at so much more than it ever revealed. – Yours, etc,