Displaced in Mullingar:The human species is fascinating, but they don't all like to be disturbed in their natural habitat, writes Michael Harding

I tend to build up anxieties, when I'm in a room on my own for too long.

Perhaps, because I'm a writer, with an empty screen, or because I wept my way through childhood, I am forever haunted by sad things. That is why I always start the day with a good walk.

In Paris, I used to walk each morning from rue des Irlandais to the graveyard of Montparnasse, just for a few moments of silence in the company of Samuel Beckett, who sleeps there.

In Mullingar, the graveyards are not so exotic, so I just wander around the streets for an hour or so.

I have friends in Dublin who speak about wildlife and nature as things that can only be found on remote rustic hillsides, but, in fact, to live in a town is to be surrounded by nature. The urban is a zoo; a labyrinth of lanes and dwellings, much like a warren, where humans eat, breathe, and sleep together, in a single collective.

Humans, like badgers, are creatures of habit.

And I like the fact that I am only three minutes from coffee house, wine shop, butcher or baker. That seems both natural and cosmopolitan.

Mullingar is a town of traders who smile at customers, and seem happy in their little hardware stores, and their vegetable shops, and their lacy lingerie boutiques.

There is a bus that stops opposite the Centra, at 7.40 every morning. The driver crosses the street, collects his morning coffee, before heading off to pick up his first passengers.

The man who owns the restaurant beside the hotel comes out to scrub his shop front with a long brush, on the same day each week, long before 8 o'clock.

The vegetable shop on Dominick Street opens early. The man puts out his stacks of potted plants. He puts out the crates of cauliflowers and cabbages. The street smells of lavender and mint. And the hardware store down the road puts out buckets and brooms and green recycle bins.

On Thursdays the fish van comes to Mullingar, and the woman opens her display, and everyone buys fresh fish. You could set your clock by her arrival.

At 8.30am, there is a rush for school. Two mothers I know come around the corner and walk up Mary Street at the same moment each day.

One of them is always smoking. And the other one doesn't. And there are two young workers, who hang around a certain alley, waiting for a lift.

Both drink coffee from delph mugs, which I presume they bring from their apartment to save money on take-aways.

Later in the morning, a few ladies eat Danish pastries and drink tea in the Harbour Mall. Sometimes they have blueberry muffins.

At lunchtime a Polish woman sits on the doorstep of her apartment, enjoying the sun, and watches her child play on the tarmac of the car-park. In the evenings after school, two older boys play tennis, with the car-park marked like Wimbledon.

It's pleasant to watch the human species in its own complex habitat.

Last Wednesday I took to the streets for the entire day. I observed old ones waddle, and flocks cackle, and young ones in complex rituals of courtship, and by mid-afternoon I was so exhilarated by my anthropological field work that I decided on an early cocktail in the Ulysses bar.

A young man sat beside me. He was wearing a dark grey suit, a pink tie and a white shirt. I knew he wasn't Enda Kenny, because I know what Enda looks like from posters. And he wasn't a Mormon because he was alone, and it was a bar, and he ordered a pint of Guinness.

But he had a face as dead as a lump of dough that someone had just hit with a rolling pin.

"Not a bad day," I said. He gazed at me with exhausted eyes that might have been staring into computer screens for years.

I said, "You're just finished work."

"Yeah."

"Let me guess," I said. "You're an auctioneer?" He stared at me with disdain, but made no comment. Okay, I thought, so not all badgers are cuddly.

The barman placed a pint in front of him. He looked at it with depressed eyes. Took a sup as if it was medicine. Then he phoned someone and said, "Hi, yeah. I'm here, in the pub. I'll meet you over there. It's dead here. Yeah. Really dead."