Displaced in Mullingar:Sleet, slush and bad lasagne are a recipe for misery, writes Mike Harding

It was never snow that made me sad. Or the whispering of Leitrim fields, hidden beneath the whiteness. But I dread the dirty sleet. The slushy streets. They remind me of childhood, and school days, and make me melancholic.

I went for a walk to shake it off, last Thursday, and came across a piebald pony sheltering beside alder bushes near the canal. He came over and nuzzled my head. We eyeballed each other. I wanted to know how he felt, in the sleet without a coat. Was he lonely? There was something between us, though it didn't amount to a conversation.

Near the train station there was a rusty sign falling off an old door. It read "CIÉ Diesel", which reminded me of a bus driver in my childhood. The sleet was stinging me.

In town, I was stopped by a girl collecting for charity. She had long brown hair, a yellow anorak, and a clipboard. She looked Indian. I wanted to ask her what she thought of Jade Goody, but I didn't, for fear it would seem out of place. Ignoring her, I walked on with a gruff, head-down determination, as if I was late for an appointment with the dentist.

By then I was perished and thinking of lunch. But, as my granny used to say when I was six, you can't be too careful what you put in your mouth. I was standing in the queue, trying to decide between the beef and the bacon. There's not much time in a busy carvery. The queue gets agitated. The chefs work fast.

Both the beef and the bacon looked skimpy. The chef cut a sliver of bacon for the person in front of me that wouldn't feed a yellow-bellied turtle. At the same moment, another chef arrived from the kitchen with a fresh tray of lasagne on his shoulder. And in that instant I made a catastrophic mistake. The words just popped out of my mouth: "The lasagne please!" There it was. On my plate. A turf of watery mincemeat with milky cheese floating on top, taken too soon from the oven.

I sat down at a table with a lad from Moscow, hoping a chat with someone would shake off the blues. My head flooded with questions I couldn't ask him. When did Dostoyevsky die? What's Monica Lewinsky doing now? Why is everyone on EastEnders always so unhappy? Eventually I said, " It's very cold out there."

He said, "No. It's not cold. In my country it's cold. This is warm."

Then I said, "I'm not from Mullingar either."

"Oh," he said, curious now, "where are you from?"

"Drumshanbo," I said, hoping it sounded Russian. "I do not know Drumshanbo," he said, staring at me.

That was the end of our chat. To be honest, I think I got on better with the horse.

Long ago, I used to visit a Traveller woman in her trailer. We had no problem chatting for hours about this and that, over mugs of sweet tea. She too was often sad, and melancholic. One day she told me that she had a child who died. She described how she saw the tiny limbs and fingers going purple and how she brought the baby to the doctor, but the child stretched in her arms, as she went in the door of the surgery, and was dead. "We got a little white dress," she said, "and a little white coffin, and we buried her in Mullingar graveyard."

There was a young man killed in Mullingar on Christmas morning. His parents are Italian. His car hit a tree on the outskirts of town. His girlfriend found him. He too is buried in a Mullingar graveyard. I passed the shop his parents manage, a few nights after Christmas. A green wreath hung on the door. A bunch of white lilies and a single red rose lay on the pavement, to let the world know their lovely boy was dead.

As I walked through the sleet last Thursday the shop was open again. Outside the AIB Bank, the girl in the yellow anorak was still collecting.

"You must be tired of it by now," I said. "You look perished."

"Yes," she said, "and hungry."