The General came for the weekend and we were having dinner when he accused me of being addicted to my phone.
“Your brain is being hacked,” he declared. ”Can you even go to the toilet without it?”
I had to admit that I often sit on the throne in the bathroom with the phone in one hand, and I always leave it on the windowsill when I’m soaking in a hot bath.
So I decided to give it up for a day, and since the following morning was Sunday I thought it might be an appropriate day of rest. When I woke I left the phone on the bedside locker – but struggled to get through breakfast in the silence.
The General stared at me and wondered if I had a headache.
“Yes,” I lied, because I didn’t want to admit that the phone’s absence was causing me enormous stress.
Later I sat on a bench in the garden to relax, where the only sound was the chirp of a cricket in the gorse. He sounded like he was using a loudhailer to pump out the dry clickety-click sound of his virility. And I have read that you can measure a cricket’s copulatory ability by the volume of his chirps, so this fellow must have been driving females daft.
Personally speaking, there’s only so much chirping I can endure from a noisy cricket when I have no phone to play with.
The sound was coming from a neighbour’s field, full of wild fern and gorse, so I decided to venture in with the handle of an old broom in my fist, intending to banish the insect from the vicinity.
I went to the bedroom, retrieved the pure white phone, turned it on, and attached my brain. Within seconds I was surfing for news
I knew the ferns and gorse were full of ticks but it was the cricket that bothered me. Every few seconds he would fall silent so that I was forced to move around the gorse chasing after him, and stumbling like Cú Chulainn flailing about in the sea.
The insect was toying with me by falling silent and then starting up again 10 metres away. And to make matters worse I could feel something crawling up my leg and digging into my backside. I fled for the safety of my own lawn to check, and sure enough a plump little tick was beavering away inside my boxer shorts with his arse and hind legs hanging out.
Whether the abundance of ticks is a result of deer or the overgrowth of ferns and gorse I know not, but I knew the black thing on my leg carried the risk of Lyme disease, and that Lyme disease can be a catastrophe.
I ran, screaming “Ticks!” and by the time I got to the patio the General was approaching with a tweezers.
“Where is it?” he demanded to know.
I told him that I was inclined to use a cigarette lighter.
“You don’t smoke,” he replied.
“We could use a match,” I suggested.
“Trust me,” he said, “I’m trained to kill. The notion that a tick will fall out if you heat its bum is not true.”
So I agreed to the intimacy of a small surgery at the General’s professional hands. He did proceed with the best practice as advised by health professionals.
A tweezers to grasp the little black devil as close to the skin as possible. Slowly pulling upwards, taking care not to crush the tick. Cleaning the bite with antiseptic soap. Thus concluded the operation.
[ Michael Harding: How a car crash in Mullingar helped reawaken my soulOpens in new window ]
The General was hugely successful, although he did observe that I appeared to be in distress. He suggested paracetamol.
“Why would I need paracetamol?” I wondered.
“Because you said you had a headache at breakfast.”
“That was a lie,” I declared. I decided to admit everything.
“I just need my phone back,” I confessed.
So I went to the bedroom, retrieved the pure white phone, turned it on, and attached my brain. Within seconds I was surfing for news from various war fronts in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan, and scrolling down X for all the latest portentous remarks from righteous politicians, entertainers and my favourite journalists.
My brain had reconnected with the necessary flow of meaningless information. I was back in the game as I sat on the bench and the General strutted around the garden sniffing the Albertine roses.
He appeared reasonably content just to stare at clouds in the sky. His ears quivered at some sound and then he spoke.
“I think I can hear a little cricket in the distance; isn’t it just delightful?”