DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I HAD a dream about a cat. It was a big marmalade cat, locked in an upstairs bedroom. A cat as big as a sheep dog. I opened the door. It looked at me with furious eyes, and white fangs bared back to the gums, as if I was its breakfast, writes Michael Harding

When I woke the following morning I checked a website for dream interpretation which said that dreaming of an angry cat wasn't good news.

"If the cat is aggressive," the website declared, "you may be having problems with the feminine aspect of your Self." I didn't need broadband to learn that. I've had problems with the feminine side of my Self for years. I simply don't know what it is.

I've searched everywhere. I quarried for it in Leitrim, without much success, and now I roam the streets of Mullingar, without finding it. I hoover the stairs, mop the kitchen floor, put out the rubbish, wash the clothes, and still I cannot root it out.

My mobile rang; a woman's name glowing on my screen. "How are things?"

I said, "Things are not good." I explained about the cat in the dream and my despair at ever finding my feminine side.

Sometimes I say things on the phone because I want people to reassure me in the opposite opinion. Sometimes I say, "I'm a bad person", just to hear the voice at the other end say, "No you're not!"

So I said, "Maybe not being in touch with my feminine side is what causes me to feel like an eejit most of my life." There was a succulent pause.

"Well," she said, "maybe there are issues you should be addressing. Yes."

Suddenly I had the urge to hang up.

I said. "I need to go now."

"Go where?"

"Nowhere important." And that was it.

The bin lorry was on the street. I could hear it. And I wasn't going to miss it yet again.

I was certain it was black bin day - when they collect domestic waste.

Because the previous week had been blue bin day - when paper is collected. I forgot about blue bin day last week. And the previous week I had missed black bin day. So both bins were stuffed up to the lids.

But as I was parking the black bin at the front door, I noticed that there was a row of blue bins along the street. So I rushed across to the Gala shop, bought another tag, switched bins, and stuck blue tag to blue bin, just as the lorry floated to a halt at the kerb beside me.

Then I went back to bed.

At lunchtime I rose, and phoned Alina from the landline downstairs. She's good with cats, and being a woman she might know about the feminine side.

But she wasn't having a good day either. I asked her what was the matter.

She said, "I am fed up with the girls I work with; they spend all day looking at their watches; they are lazy."

"Perhaps they're having problems with their feminine side?" I suggested.

"They are women!" Alina pointed out.

"True. But then perhaps they're having problems with their masculine side!"

"Irish people are always unhappy," she said. "Except when they drink."

I protested that even when drinking, Irish people remain melancholic.

I knew a teacher once, in Sligo, who would spend late nights with me in Hargadons pub, drinking aimlessly.

One night I said, "You're not a happy man!"

He had an elbow on the bar. A cigarette in his right hand floating in the air between us. He was leaning towards me, tears welling up inside him.

"You know," he said, "I married an English woman. She was very jolly. I couldn't understand her; it made no sense, no sense at all. Especially in the mornings," he said. "She'd be chuckling at the radio downstairs, before I was even shaved."

Alina smiled. She even said, "You make me laugh."

The rest of the day was uneventful. Except for an old Polish man in poor clothes who knocked on my door in the afternoon.

He was selling charcoal drawings of cats, for €10 each. He handed me a small photograph of a little girl.

Block capitals were scrawled on the back of the photograph, asserting that the little girl was sick, and that he was trying to raise money so that she could be cured. I took the cat, and he smiled at me, as I handed him the money.