'The longing to be touched gnaws at many old men'

Below is Michael Harding's column, which appeared in yesterday's Irish Times.

Like all writers and talkers, that includes journalists and priests, they can can grow tedious and boring. People easily turn off. But this Harding column is well worth a read. Funny and true. Real too.

"Since the cat died I have had no pet to hold, no feral thing to hug or feel connected with, although birds come to the bench outside the window for peanuts.

But there was something wonderful about touching a cat. She was always huggable. And I can’t really hug the birds. As I sit by the stove, I can only look out through the glass door at them, feeling as untouchable as a goldfish in its bowl. Maybe I need a massage.

I have had a voucher since Christmas for a unisex beauty therapy centre in Mullingar, although I don’t feel there is any therapy that could make me beautiful. So I didn’t use it, and it was almost out of date. Which is why I mentioned it to the General.

We were drinking on Sunday night, and I offered it to him in return for the Jägermeister he brought with him. Apparently it’s the libation of surfers.

“I met a wonderful nurse when I was having my prostate checked in Tallaght last week,” he said. “She said they drink it with Red Bull.”

“It tastes like cough mixture,” I said.

“Try another one,” he suggested, and admittedly after a few more shots my body warmed up like a storage heater, and the General began stretching his pot-bellied torso with a modest elderly sensuality. With his rump to the flames he looked like a man capable of surfing the waves himself.

And that’s when I offered him the voucher.

“Maybe they could burn the hair out of your ears,” I teased, “or take a spade to your nostrils, where the hair grows like rushes in a ditch.”

“Why don’t you use it yourself?” he retorted.

“I’m heading for Donegal this week, and the voucher is almost out of date,” I said.

Waxing caught his attention 

“Waxing” was the word that eventually caught his attention on the gift certificate.

“But my ears are perfectly fine,” he mused.

“I think they mean the other type of waxing,” I said. He stared at me until the penny dropped.

“Ah, I see,” he said, slipping the voucher into his breast pocket and muttering something about how desperately men need a woman’s touch.

I suppose the unfulfilled longing to be touched gnaws away at many old men.

Although I was afflicted when I was only 11, at teenage dances in Cavan town. They were held in the loft of an old hotel that has long since been demolished. It was a long room of cobwebs, bare light bulbs, with benches against the wall and a floor of wooden planks worn away by time. A few mothers wrapped in overcoats sat behind a table, selling soft drinks, and a record player sat on the floor, with external speakers on the window ledges.

Spin the bottle

The hops, as the dances were called, happened on Friday evenings between 7pm and 10pm, and what terrified me most was the game of spin the bottle.Occasionally the mothers would go downstairs to drink genteel whackers of brandy in the hotel lounge, while upstairs the games commenced.

Someone stood sentry outside the door. The record player was abandoned, and everyone gazed in awe at the Cavan Cola bottle spinning on the floor.

I’ve read erotic scenes in books over the years, and I’ve been aroused by stunningly unexpected moments in movies, but I never found anything in life as wonderful as the random promiscuity that could be generated with a Cavan Mineral Water bottle spinning on its side.

To actually walk across a room and kiss a girl’s lips was beyond my capabilities at 11 years of age, and so I sat in the corner, sucking fizzy orange through a straw, terrified of reality and yet longing to be part of the circle.

Even when I was on the floor I rarely touched my partner. Brash couples bumped their hips together as they danced to the beat of the Beatles, but my shy body hardly swayed at all. I just tossed my limbs lethargically, more like a tree in the wind than a young male attempting to connect with a female.

I remember once asking a girl out for a slow dance, what was called a “smooch”, and I held her tight, but only out of fear. With my head on her shoulder I didn’t have to look her in the eye.

And when the dance was over I let her go and walked away without further conversation.

“You’re a cold fish,” she muttered, as I returned to my bowl of melancholy that kept me apart from the world for so many years."