Displaced in Mullingar: intimacy is a tricky issue in built-up areas, writes Michael Harding

I wouldn't say that Leitrim people are unhygienic. But it is my experience that in Mullingar a person has to wash more often. I use more shampoo. I buy soap in six packs. And I have become a 24-7 deodorised dude.

I consider shampoo and soap to be the hallmarks of modern Ireland. To be in a state of grace in the 21st century is a tangible thing: it is to be washed. A body just out of the shower exudes an elegance that is as close as urban life gets to a metaphysical condition.

Intimacy is a tricky issue in built-up areas.

The Internet cafe is intimate. I like getting one of the machines at the window, and looking out onto the street, at the passers-by, and at the red-bricked houses opposite. There's a Sue Ryder Shop nearby, and a pub called the Zubar. It feels like I'm on Coronation Street. I keep expecting to see Jack Duckworth on his way to the Rovers.

The beautiful young woman beside me was in a fur coat. I presume there were clothes beneath the fur, but all I could see was her perfect black pageboy head, sticking out of what might have been an entire family of dead huskies, and her long, manicured fingernails trotting across the keyboard beside me in a flurry of stress.

Suddenly she started talking as she typed. Apparently she was desperate for a haircut. To my eye, she didn't look like she needed a haircut at all, but she felt she did, and whoever she usually went to couldn't do her that morning, and by now she was livid with rage.

I'm not used to people opening up like that in the internet cafe, but she was in a serious temper, so I said, jokingly, that I sometimes suspect that there are more hairdressing salons in Mullingar than in Paris. But you'll not find Mullingar hair salons on the internet, I said. Maybe you should try the phone book. She looked at me as if I was suggesting she go to a barber.

I think she felt her hair problem was none of my business. I looked at her coat and began thinking that maybe it was real fur. And she stared back at me as if I might be her next dinner. Finally it dawned on me that she was not talking to me at all. She was on a Bluetooth link to her mother. I turned my face with what little dignity I could muster to my own screen, and read my own e-mail in silence.

When I was in Mongolia, years ago, travelling across the plains with a jeep of monks, we only washed whenever we came upon a stream. Which was not very often. And there was a whiff off every human body in the jeep, which surpassed the worst excesses of a fox. But in the end we got used to it. And we came to accept body odours as something human. And since Mongolia is simply one wide-open space, everyone could stand off from everyone else, and in the jeep we kept the windows open.

But on my way home from that trip I was deeply embarrassed in the London underground when I was caught in a sardine-tight squeeze at eight in the morning, and all the young women were holding the railings above their heads, pure perfume wafting from their hairless armpits, and me standing there trying to avoid doing something similar because I knew my own oxter was singing like a dead yak. I cannot easily forget the resentful look in the eyes of those ladies, who had to endure me all the way to Leicester Square.

Fortunately the woman in the internet cafe did not hold anything against me. She was much too busy finding a solution to her own personal crisis. In fact she did find Mullingar hairdressers on the internet, and she had secured a new appointment in a few minutes. And then, triumphantly, she phoned a friend called Alice, and asked would they meet later for a mocha, if Alice was free, at, say, around, one-ish. Then she got up and left, leaving just a delicate trace of Chanel in the air as she went out the door.