MICHAEL HARDING IS DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I cooked her a steak when she arrived. She wanted it rare, with blood on the plate, but in my overexcitement, I left the steak too long on the pan, and she was not amused when she sunk her teeth into it. She had lovely teeth, black hair, unplucked eyebrows and a briefcase; she had a PhD in Gender Studies.

On the canal bench, I spoke of primroses because it was almost May, and I was mad enough to think that I could charm her.

"Did you know," I said, "that in the old days, people scattered primroses across the threshold of a house, on the first morning in May?"

"Pourquoi?"

"To keep the fairies out."

"Do they still do such silly things?"

"No." I said, "not anymore." Then I tried to impress her with my extensive knowledge of Irish womanhood. "I knew a woman one time," I said, "who was reared on an island in the Shannon. She had a farm of 20 acres, but it dwindled to 10 in winter, when the river swelled. And she cycled seven miles one time, to get her teeth pulled out.

"She put red ribbons on the cows before they calved, and she told me that she used to see a ball of light on the river in the same place every May, until she got a Mass said for the wandering soul. A hard life, certainly, but at least she was in touch with her sacred space."

My companion was unimpressed; she found a primrose, twiddled it in her fingers, and exhaled through her lips, like a horse.

"That woman," I said, "was not just in touch with nature; she was in touch with the other world; she was in tune with her own soul."

"Soul?" The French woman repeated with a distain worthy of Voltaire. "There is not such a thing! She was just a superstitious old woman." Many years of secular education had clearly erased any innate religious sensibility, but I tried to maintain a cheerful exterior. "I once met a nun who worked in an African desert, teaching children how to swim," I declared, defiantly.

"Swim?" she exclaimed. "In the desert?"

"Yes. She put planks of wood across the chairs, and made them learn all the strokes, beneath the hot sun."

"Pourquoi?"

"She said it stretched their imaginations."

The sceptical professor rose from the bench and suggested that we should walk, towards the town. The remoteness of the canal was not amusing her.

She said she would like to get the lunchtime train. "Perhaps you can find yourself some primroses on the way," she said, with delicate irony. We moved briskly towards town, without further ado. I said, "Mullingar is beautiful on a spring morning." Paris woman did her horse imitation again.

Near Sunday's Well Road, a man in a white truck waited for the gates of a building site to open, as he munched a sandwich. A train moved across the bridge above Belvedere Terrace. Greyhounds with muzzled snouts watched us from the back of a van, near the dog track.

A man halfway up a ladder, leaning against Wallaces' pub, was painting the wall white, and across the street a frilly Holy Communion dress was the centrepiece of a shop window where a lady was cleaning the glass.

Outside the ACC bank, a man in an anorak and track shoes moved his limbs slowly through the air, in a t'ai chi dance. "He's there most mornings," a woman in the vegetable shop said. "He must work at night."

A man from Ballinacarrigy sat outside the newsagents, playing spoons, his cardboard box already filling with euro from people who greeted him warmly, and called his name as they tossed the coins.

Inside, a travelling woman was buying lotto tickets. She had blue jeans and long black hair, that was gathered at the nape of her neck by a yellow bobbin, and from her ivory ears there hung two silver hoops.

My companion whispered, "Bonjour". But we found no primroses. She waved politely from a carriage window, as the train floated away towards Sligo, and I returned to the canal bench, where I could lick my wounds, and dream of a time, when I was mad with love, in the faraway hills - donkey's years ago.