Michael Harding: I was getting too stressed in the fast lane in Cavan

I was heading for Dzogen Beara meditation centre in Co Cork for a few days’ rest, because I was getting too stressed in the fast lane in Cavan. But meditation centres make me nervous. There are always too many young people: boys as thin as whippets and girls so frail that if they ate a slice of apple you’d see it going down. And they can usually sit in full lotus positions and stay motionless for an endless amount of time, while I’m shifting and grunting, and trying to make myself at ease on a cushion and trying not to disgrace myself by an accidental fart.

So instead of going straight to the meditation centre I decided to stop off in Glengarriff for a feed of beef steak and a luxurious night in a good hotel before what I expected would be a few lean days on the cliffs above Castletownbere.

I parked outside the Eccles Hotel, a grand Victorian building, went inside and ordered an enormous steak. It was excellently cooked. I washed it down with a bottle of wine. The evening sun was slanting in the windows. The lady at reception asked me what kind of room I would like.

“Give me your finest please,” I said.

She eyed me up and down. I suppose she was wondering by the cut of my clothes if I had the money to pay for a decent room in such a fine hotel. She paused; there was a kind of stand-off between us, so I repeated my demand.

“Your finest room please,” I repeated, in a calm, understated voice.

She said, “Our finest room is the Yeats Suite.”

Well that sealed it. There he was again, the old shadow, following me around the country with his big libido.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

She whispered the price.

“I’m on my holidays,” I said.

Bigger than a small house

And so I ended up in the Yeats Suite of the Eccles Hotel, a room bigger than a small house, with burgundy wallpaper, blue carpets, a bed with 7ft-high curtains draped at the headboard, Victorian fog chandeliers, a bathroom as big as a small hospital, a variety of sofas and a balcony facing the sea. Clearly the Eccles Hotel was the perfect refuge for a noble mind, like mine or Mr Yeats’s. In fact, I discovered after flicking through a few brochures that not only had Yeats been a frequent visitor, but Bernard Shaw had also been through the doors, and a few European heads of state.

I stood on the balcony thinking of the good old days when the manageress used to survey the world from the same position in the 1960s.

I know all this because I once danced with a girl who spent four months of the summer working as a dishwasher in the hotel. She was a bohemian-type student from Offaly who wanted to earn drinking money for the winter in college in 1971, so she submitted to the strict routines of life as a hotel servant, wearing starch-white aprons over black dresses, ready for anything, including, on one occasion, emptying a chamber pot from beneath the bed of elderly gentlemen who insisted the en-suite toilet was too far away.

Of course, I was well used to emptying potties myself in the late 1960s when I worked as an orderly in a hospital. I was the night porter, and my duty at 6am each day was to collect the urinals from beneath the beds in the medical ward, measure the fluid ounces, and mark the result on a chart at the foot of each bed.

For a brief moment in 1972, myself and the wild Offaly girl compared notes as we jived around the National Ballroom in Dublin, although chamber pots was probably not the right subject matter to set our relationship on fire, and we agreed to part when the Dixies showband struck up a slow dance.

I slept well at the Eccles Hotel, and dreamed of Mr Yeats and his big libido pacing the floor as he tried to compose lines of poetry.

“Imagine the two of us in the same bed,” I said in my dream.

“Be quiet,” Yeats said, “I’m trying to write.”

“Why don’t you come with me to the Buddhist centre,” I remarked, not sure if I was speaking to Yeats or some other ghost. But then I woke up and realised I was alone in the beautiful room, and in the morning I enjoyed two poached eggs and a pot of tea before heading onwards towards the rugged cliffs beyond Castletownbere.