Displaced in Mullingar:Living in a metrosexual-free zone, being offered a voucher for a massage can cause no end of stress, writes Michael Harding

When I was a child, my mother would often drive out the Killeshandra road on a Friday evening, to get a fresh farm chicken for the weekend.

The farmer wore a grey shop-coat, and sucked cigarettes. He would stomp about the yard in his wellies with a big chopping knife - a kind of a hatchet - looking for a particularly nice bird. He smelled of chickens and damp towels, and as he unhooked something dead from  the long line of hanging birds in the shed, and chopped clean through its neck, blood spurted onto his hands, which he'd rub into the sleeves of his coat.

He'd snatch the legs and claws off the bird, at the knuckles, and wag them in my face for a laugh. He was as lovely a man as you could meet.

I shared this memory recently, with a taxi driver. The taxi man confessed that he still nurtures the belief that if you wash too often, you scrub the oils out of your skin.

"Do you know what a metrosexual is?" he inquired.

I didn't. Apparently, metrosexuals are males, so conditioned by the close contact of urban life, that they scrub everything at regular intervals, and then smother themselves with anti-perspirants, deodorants and other sweet-smelling powders.

"Gone are the days when showband singers would change their shirt on stage in Drumlish," he said, "and fling the sweaty linen into the audience, for some young lady to cherish, like the Shroud of Turin, for the rest of her life."

He had a voucher for "D-Stress" on Mount Street, but he said he was afraid to use it in case his neck and head muscles might not be able to endure a vigorous massage.

"Sure that would cause me no end of stress," he explained.

My local pub is a metrosexual-free zone; a shadowy corner of Mullingar where men sit on the high stools, as still as insects on the side of a tree, with broken hearts and blotchy faces; a sad world where invisible men go when they have become exhausted by marriages they can't let go of. A world of lost boys. The last stand of a shamed patriarchy.

I was there last Tuesday afternoon, listening to a bewildered old man coughing phlegm into his handkerchief, when one of the regulars turned to me and said, "Where were you this past two weeks? There was no sign of ye."

I said, "I was away."

He said, "You missed the Ballinasloe Horse Fair. It was the biggest fair in living memory."

"Did you go?" I asked.

"I did."

"Did you buy?"

"I bought an elephant," he said. "A wooden thing; as big as your briefcase; €24."

"Maybe the people who make those elephants are exploited," I suggested.

He said, "I couldn't care less; sure, you could be buying jumpers and trousers there in Tesco's, and you wouldn't know what end of China they came out of."

There's a new mini-mart in Mullingar, between the greyhound stadium and the arts centre. Everything is from Poland and Russia: spices, chocolates, pastas, soup mixes and frozen salted fish. But what brought me in was the sight of Alina, a Polish girl poking around the display of Russian DVDs.

She's broken-hearted because she threw her boyfriend out, and then she couldn't afford to keep her apartment, so she had to get a smaller one.

And they won't let her keep a cat in the new apartment. So she doesn't know what to do about Kotka.

"I mean," she said, "I can get another boyfriend. But Kotka came from my mother."

Later I went to Xtravision and rented a movie called Next, about a man who could see two minutes into the future. He reminded me of a barman I knew one time in east Galway who also claimed a certain clairvoyance; a man who could predict the numbers in the Lotto draw. The tragedy was that the window of his omniscience only opened as the balls were flying around in the bubble.

It wasn't a great movie, but as I lay on the sofa in front of a warm fire, even I could see the future. So I phoned Alina and I told her that I knew what she needed.

"I have a voucher for an Indian head massage at the D-Stress place," I said. "I think you might enjoy it."

"Ahhhh," she said, in a lovely warm Polish accent.

"Thank you. I think you are a good man."