Displaced in Mullingar: A potent combination of DIY and home cooking has Michael Hardingtuning into Boris Yeltsin on 'Liveline'

I needed curtains for the bedroom window. The problem was that people could see in, and since I spend a long time sitting at the computer screen in the bedroom, and like to give free rein to my imagination at all times, curtains have always seemed to me like a good idea.

The lady behind the counter who sells curtains is from Lithuania. She's been in Mullingar for three years, with her husband, and she likes it, but she gets homesick. She looked into my eyes and said: "Next Thursday I go home for holiday."

Then she showed me lovely white lace material, with pretty designs, like squiggles on a Newgrange wall, and she said it would be very nice on my window.

I bought three yards and a rail, and went home to hang them up.

Later that morning I went to the bank, and was in the queue, listening to a report on Sky about whether the English Prince Harry will or won't go to Iraq.

There were two women behind me. One said: "That's a good day again."

The other said: "It's never a good day when you're on your own." Then she explained that her husband had abandoned her. She was depressed and she didn't care whether it was a good day or a rainy day. "Sometimes," she said, "I even think it's better when it's raining."

I suppose her therapist encourages her to talk about things, rather than bottle them up.

She said: "It's like an amputation. I feel like one of me limbs is gone.

"He had the neck to phone one time, from a jacuzzi in Montana saying he wanted to talk," she added. "Talk! And him in the bath with some other one!"

I think it might have been the curry that did the damage. I cooked it on Thursday. On Friday I had the stir fry, which seemed okay. But then on Saturday I reheated the dregs of the curry and the remains of the stir fry, and devoured both.

I rounded all that off with a banana. To be honest, I was even suspicious about the banana. A fruit comes in its own skin, but the thing about bananas is that nobody ever washes their hands before they peel them.

And the final remote possibility I thought about was the gym. You can never be too careful about leisure centres. It's all that nakedness. All those bare bodies in the locker rooms emitting dubious vapours. Best remedy for good health is to stay fully clothed at all times.

Sensing the apocalypse, I stayed in bed the following day.

On Monday morning I went for a meeting down town. I risked a scone, which, for all I know, might have been under the sideboard for 10 years. It was the straw in the camel's belly, to coin a phrase. I returned home to the apartment and lay down to die.

The gastric climax was not far away. It began as a sudden rumble, just as Sean O'Rourke closed the News at One with a round-up of sports events. Unable to get back to the off button on the radio, I endured the entire Joe Duffy show sitting on the loo, in disbelief at what the unruly body can produce in terms of germ and stink.

The rest, as they say, is the history of chemicals: Motilium, Imodium, paracetamol, Lomotil, Maxolon and Dioralyte. Bleach and Parazone were the only perfumes to sweeten my world.

My sleep was troubled. I dreamed that Yeltsin was on the radio talking to Joe Duffy. I dreamed that my lady of the lace curtains was floating in the clouds above Dublin airport.

There were blue skies in Montana, and the little English prince was gadding about the desert in the midday sun.

A friend phoned, and asked me how I was. I said: "I'm sick. I'm in bed. I have a stomach bug."

He said: "The stomach is very important. You need to take care of the stomach. If anything goes wrong in there, it's serious."

I said: "I think it's only a bug."

He said he noticed from his long experience of visiting hospitals that the majority of scars on patients after surgery are usually around the tummy. "So you can conclude," he said, "that the most serious thing that can go wrong is the tummy."

He said, "I hope you'll be alright."

I said: "So do I."