Michael Harding: How a car crash in Mullingar helped reawaken my soul

A long time ago I was driving around Mullingar when another car collided with mine at a roundabout.

The driver was a young man with a learner plate in the window, and nobody with him. It was debatable which of us was in the wrong since we bumped into each other on the roundabout. Was he going too fast, or did I refuse to give way?

We ended up on a side street examining a mark on the front fender of his vehicle, beside the engine grille, caused when he hit the side of my vehicle.

So we called the Garda and, by the time they arrived, I had taken stock of his L plate and the fact that he was alone and the distress that was gathering in his face.

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The guard said to sort it out between ourselves. The little scar on the fender wouldn’t cost much to fix, the guard suggested, no matter who was paying.

I said that if it cost only a few euros I’d be happy to cover it. The guard was relieved and he headed off.

That evening I got a phone call from the boy’s father. He said his son was very shook. Considering that the front fender needed replacing, and work would be required on the front grille, he estimated the total bill to be around €700.

In an outburst of indignation I told him he was a gobshite and that his son deserved better. But I paid the money, since I had admitted responsibility. And afterwards I tried to figure out how I could earn some extra cash.

A month earlier I had received an invitation to present a one-man show at a St Patrick’s Day Festival in Newfoundland. I had dismissed the invite at the time because Newfoundland seemed so far away but now I picked up the phone with enthusiasm.

I proposed a fee of €700 for a 90-minute performance. They agreed, and I headed off across the ocean.

The wild and remote edge of Canada was covered in snow, and sunlight bounced off the white land around me. There was snow everywhere; stacked up against hotel gables, lying in heaps beside the pavements and covering the roofs and bonnets of parked cars. I happen to love snow, and felt I was in paradise, away from the wet streets of Mullingar, and the limp festivities of Patrick’s Day in a provincial Irish town.

I fell in love with half a dozen Newfoundlanders, and marvelled at the vast wilderness, the wooden houses, the flickering stoves and the icicles hanging from the guttering. I listened to stories about gannets and polar bears and moose that got run down by cars at roundabouts.

It was an unexpected released from the mundane life I was caught up in at home. It reawakened my soul. The disaster at the roundabout in Mullingar had produced a positive outcome. An obstacle had been turned into a stepping stone on the path towards happiness.

One day I watched an uileann piper, who had travelled from Ireland for the same festival, falling off a snow mobile in a white field.

“What are you laughing at?” the uileann piper wanted to know, as he emerged from beneath the snowdrift.

“I’m happy,” I declared. “I’m just so delighted to be here.”

Recently I was in Carrick-on-Shannon to collect take-out food from the wonderful DeVino restaurant. Only one person was allowed inside the door at any time so I queued for a while on the street. When my turn arrived the order was still cooking, and I was moved to the dining area to sit alone and wait until it was ready. There was no background music. There were no other customers in the dining area. And I felt like a ghost among the empty tables.

Outside the window people in masks queued silently. They too appeared like ghosts. As if “the living” might be the invisible ones; still walking the streets and eating in restaurants, except that we could not see them.

Sometimes the lockdown feels that bad. I get lost. And I know by the eyes of strangers behind their flimsy blue masks that they too are frightened. And I see despair in the eyes of friends on Zoom who have been alone for far too long.

Covid 19 is a massive obstacle on the path to any good future. But just like my encounter on the roundabout in Mullingar, I try to see it as a stepping stone. Although it’s not always easy.