Displaced in Mullingar: Michael Harding settles into town life, far from the Scots pines and the sound of badgers, in the second of a new series

It's been two months since I landed in Mullingar and I think I have done little but walk the streets, and stare into shop windows, sorting out the phone bill, the ESB, the bank debits and the dreaded washing machine. All the usual monotony of moving into a new space.

When the full moon floated above Mullingar on Monday morning, I felt a sense of loss because I lived for years in the countryside, cherishing moon, mountains and lake, as markers that told me who I was each day I woke to look at them.

I was once surrounded by trees. But from the front window of the apartment I can see only an enclosed courtyard, the white markings on the tarmac numbered for each apartment. I can see the other apartments; identical to mine which surround the courtyard. And the cars that park there. And the tenants who come and go with their shopping baskets.

It's difficult to name my emotions in this moment. A simple sense of shock perhaps. The first morning I spent a solid hour just staring out and grieving for the loss of Sliabh an Iarainn.

Perhaps I clung to the side of that mountain for too long. Reading poetry in a beautiful landscape. Stuck in an Ireland that was dissolving. Bogged down in a rural fantasy, haunted by notions of a Gaelic past, deluding myself about how good it was to be part of a community, where the trees got festooned with GAA flags whenever the local team was playing in a final. A romantic Ireland, where life was lived only as nostalgia, and fuelled by thousands of gallons of central heating oil.

Town life is like another planet to me. I miss the wind in the Scots pines. I miss the hazel and chestnut, the alder and frugal willow. The ruffled lake on windy days. The sad eyes of cattle in the neighbour's field. The sound of badgers at night scratching against the shed as they dig for worms. The pheasants behind the rushes. And the smell of turf from open fires. But it's all gone now. It's all over.

I have come to Mullingar to see if I can discover the 21st century. To see if I can belong in a New Ireland, in the cement and concrete zoo of apartments and housing clusters. And it's different here. There's no place for idle romance. No taste for mythic landscapes. It's real. It's gritty. The fields grow grass. The cattle eat it. And the town means business.

Walking the streets of Mullingar this week, I bumped into someone I had known years ago. "What are you doing here?" he asked. As if writers should always live up mountains, and far away. In Donegal they ask you how long you're staying. In Kerry they say "what brings you to the Kingdom?" - in a tone that makes you feel crossing the Kerry border was your life's achievement.

But in Mullingar on the street outside a toyshop my friend looked disappointed. As if I had let him down. As if a man who writes plays and works in theatre should always maintain a far-away life in wonderful places. But not Mullingar! Mullingar is not quite the exotic landscape I'd imagine a theatrical person like yourself to be planted, he said.

I explained to him that my rustic paradise had been an imagined country, and that recently it had dissolved into the air. Now, like the last Mohican, I was homeless, nation-less, and needed to fall in love with somewhere else, anywhere else, and preferably a town.

"Have you been drinking?" he inquired.

A savage loves his native sod, I said, and the savage in me needs to love somewhere. So why not Mullingar? To feel it breathe, and sleep and wake and work. To hear it. To belong in it. To know it as unlovely and ordinary and yet be amazed at its shadow turning every hour.

He was looking at me as if he was desperately hoping I wouldn't ask him to go for a coffee. He wished me luck, as one wishes the bewildered luck, and we walked off in opposite directions.

Stranded outside the toyshop I felt a gravity about the parked cars and the slated buildings. Even people crossing the street seemed to enjoy a stocky, bulky density. No moon now above the rooftops. And no wind howling in the trees to call me into the wonder of a dreamed world.