Displaced in Mullingar Not everyone went on holiday this summer. Michael Hardingexplains why he didn't go to Thailand - or Leitrim

I don't do postcards. I think they are an act of aggression. An adult taunt, conceived on the cobbled streets of Mediterranean villages, or the golden beaches of Asia, and cast like arrows at the miserable wretches who are glued to hedge clippers and paintbrushes all summer long.

Not that I do beaches either. I was on a beach in India once, where very poor children were selling Coke. I had drained my bottle to the dregs before someone told me that I might not be the first person on the beach to have sucked out of that straw.

But staying in Mullingar for an entire summer was a mistake. I felt torn between Leitrim and Asia, and wound up going nowhere.

I didn't want to go back to Leitrim, for fear that I might be overwhelmed by nostalgia. And I didn't want to go to Thailand, for fear of flooding with guilt, as I lay on a beach somewhere watching blue waves, and listening to planes overhead, ploughing through the ozone layer, while starving children begged for dollars down below.

So I stayed put. Postcards arrived from France, Vietnam, and Cuba. A friend travelled to Italy for an opera. He said the hairs stood up on the back of his neck, as he listened to La Traviata in Milan, on a warm evening in early July.

"Are you taking a holiday?" he wondered.

I explained that my lease expired in June, and so I was too busy hunting for another place to live.

And I did find a semi-detached house not far from the town centre, with a little grassy bit at the front, and a shed at the back.

In Leitrim, I used to spend the summer on a ride-on lawn mower, cutting through the rushes and the long grass with the swagger of a battle tank commander, so it was humiliating to be stationed on a patch of lawn the size of a large bathroom, with a flexed gadget buzzing like an electric razor.

There is more to Mullingar than just the main streets. There are sprawling housing estates, red-roofed, or black-roofed; brick-faced or pebble-dashed; all around the motorways. Little villages, with their own Centra, Gala or Spar, and grassy knolls or car parks haunted by lanky teenagers.

A thousand lights on, in a thousand little front rooms, where everybody watches a thousand television channels. Life here is not permanent. But it's another place to call home.

I did make a trip to Dublin, to see Lucian Freud's paintings at Imma.

One naked male on canvas hung before the spectators with such authority that a little boy gazed at it with the terror of a rabbit staring at an elephant.

I presumed the man holding the little boy's hand was his father.

"What do you think of the frame?" he asked the boy. The child was speechless.

I got to Tralee for one night, but the Festival was over, and everyone was hoarse.

By the end of August I had begun to ogle at a big Seg television in Dunnes Stores. Every day I'd tell myself I needed another jar of Dolmio, or a fresh lettuce, but I was fooling nobody.

Eventually I approached the manager.

"It's the last one," he said.

I was overwhelmed with an anxiety that I might miss this last chance of Paradise.

So I bought it instantly, and as casually as if it was only a slice of ham, and a young fellow wheeled it to the jeep, on a trolley, and before darkness fell on Mullingar, I was reclining on a sofa in my new home, with the big blue screen glowing at me from the corner; a perfect partner; a reliable friend.

Unlike the human body, with its mess of emotion and random juices, televisions can't let you down. Or so I told myself. Until I took out the remote control and found it was a dud.

"I have to get up each time the ads come on," I explained to the manager, the next day.

"I know," he said, "you want the television to work. You don't want to be getting up and down all the time." "Yes," I said, "that's about it." "No problem," he said. "We'll get you a new remote. Next week." He was so understanding that I decided to be patient, and wait.

And so I sit on the sofa, waiting for a new remote, with the juices of an unlived summer swirling around in my tummy.