Back down to earth with a culture shock

Displaced in Mullingar: Michael Harding begins his new life in Mullingar with grim but heroic determination, in the first of a weekly diary

The children in Halloween masks this week reminded me of summer. I spent July and August in a tent rehearsing with Theatre Du Radeau in Le Mans just an hour by train from Paris. Radeau are a modern avant-garde company with an enormous reputation all over Europe.

In the hot stifling days of July we could not work when the sun was high - particularly because rehearsals were held in a long black tent the size of a large house. It was pitched in a field beside dense woodland just outside the town. So work began around five each evening, and continued into the early hours of the following morning.

We ate supper at a long table in the open air, just outside the tent; the smell of fish on the wood fire barbecue mingling with laughter and exuberant conversation.

This meal in the open air usually occurred around eight o'clock, after two or three hours of rehearsal in the tent. Sometimes, for these rehearsals, the actors dressed in period costumes and sometimes painted white masks on their faces. And since nobody ever bothered changing out of costume, the dinner party in the open air had all the flavours of Halloween.

On the first of September I took the evening train to Paris and dined out with friends. We sat at a table on the pavement, with all the elegance of Paris strutting before us, as we enjoyed a spicy wine and slivers of meat swimming in a pepper sauce. With each morsel I was savouring the last few moments of a very special summer.

Coming home is not easy, when you've had such good fun abroad. You try to drag out the final farewells, with hugs and kisses and goodbyes and promises of doing it all again next year. But it's only when you reach the Aer Lingus check-in that reality kicks in.

There's something about the familiarity of Irish faces. You imagine you recognise everyone. It all confirms the unbearable truth that Ireland's real tragedy is its isolation from the rest of Europe.

And it doesn't get much better when you land in Dublin or drag your cases into Connolly Station; a sad shambles after the flashy electronic elegance of European trains. In Connolly Station the timetable board hangs over the entrance to the platforms, under a glass roof, so that on a day of strong sunshine, it's hardly possible to detect just when the train for Mullingar is leaving.

I was lucky. I had my ticket. I was early. I got a seat. I had lots of time to stare out the window. I made the ceremonial phone call to alert the better half that I was now on the train. And that was it. I did not lose my nerve, or try to turn back the clock. I did not flinch from the future that awaited me. Nor did I cry out or break down or beg the other passengers to swap tickets with me, or to release me from my destiny. No. I stared out the window, stoic and bold, and accepted my fate with grim but heroic determination. I was about to begin my new life - in Mullingar.

I used to imagine Mullingar as a Country and Western town. A place of showbands still lingering somewhere in lounge bars. A place where stocky, well-built couples tiptoed on the dance floor with understated steps and courtesies. A ballroom of nostalgia rather than romance. And outside I used to imagine a car park full of Jeeps purring in the dark.

I was right about the car parks. There is a well-heeled whiff off the exhaust pipes in Westmeath. The luxuriant green grass of the hinterland is breathtakingly beautiful, especially for someone familiar with Leitrim's thin soil. But in reality Mullingar is also a town of immigrants in high-rise apartment blocks. A town of multicultural off-licences, multi-lingual computer shops and multi-store shopping arcades. The cash machines are singing. From the well heeled to the new arrivals, Mullingar is a big, dozing world of self-contentment.

And please don't ask me what I am doing here. Let us say that we all live with a certain fragility in these modern times, and I am in Mullingar for personal reasons. I am one of the fast-growing number of displaced persons inhabiting lonely corners of the modern world, replete with complex emotional baggage, and who is here, for the time being, for personal reasons.