Michael Harding: 'It's like stand-up comedy, but I call it stand-up philosophy'

After years of illness and depression, Michael Harding has learned to embrace winter — and the mortality it mirrors

Michael Harding: “You can see yourself getting more fragile as you get older. You don’t want to be in hotel rooms on your own, like I am at the moment, passing the day, it’s unbearable. It’s sad.” Photograph: Moya Nolan

Michael Harding is nothing if not honest. “I had fierce difficulty with that book,” he says of his newest volume, Midwinter: A Journey Through a Season.

“I know that it reads as if it was an easy enough book to write, and yet the struggles with it were ferocious to face up to.”