Displaced in Mullingar Female/male, poor/rich, Polish/Irish, bikes/Mercs - Michael Hardingloses sleep over the differences that separate us all.

I was in the Centra one night. It closes at 11pm, and the young Polish woman behind the counter was exhausted. "When do you finish?" I inquired.

"Eleven minutes and 20 seconds more," she said.

As I pressed in my pin number for the petrol she spoke like we were old friends.

"My baby is six months, and she cry all last night. And my partner, he go to work at six, and the door bang and wake her again. So I am awake all night and all day. Then I work."

I couldn't sleep after that speech. Tossing and turning and wondering if I should buy a lamp for the bicycle, since the evenings are closing in. But after a few hours chewing that conundrum, and staring at the ceiling, I realised that the bicycle wasn't the bother; it was the beautiful woman in the shop who was keeping me awake.

The following morning I cycled into town and locked the bike to a pole outside Tesco. Shafts of sunlight illuminated the vegetable area. The peppers and rosso lettuce were fresh. The Chianti was at half price.

And the customers were mostly women, and nobody was rushing. A woman pushed a trolley as a little boy held on to the back pocket of her jeans.

A pregnant woman in a tight black T shirt and trousers rummaged about in the cheeses. The cosmetics area was jammed. Skirts and frocks and jeans filled every aisle. Tall women. Stout women. Old women with brittle fingers, and young twentysomethings in the full flush of maternity and love. Exotic scents and perfumes swirling and wafting to the rafters.

The unresolved beauty of faces, without make-up, and still on the edge of last night's dreams. Everyone quietly astonished at how perfect the world can be in one accidental moment.

Since infancy I have loved the company of women. Even as a teenager I used to dream of hairdressing salons.

In childhood I endured too many barber shops. Terrible places of shriven men, smelling of leather, and tangy chemicals. Chain-smoking barbers with combs arrayed in the breast pockets of their white coats.

But when I was 16 I got my first wash and blow-dry, in a snazzy black marble-fronted salon on Grafton Street.

An intimate experience beyond my wildest dreams, as a young girl with a Dublin accent, plum-coloured lips, and teeth that kept grinding her chewing gum, pushed my head backwards into a basin. She leaned her upper body over me, turned on the hot water, and massaged my scalp into a lather of soap, with fingers as firm as if she were kneading dough.

Since then I often dream that I am blindfolded outside a barber's shop, and am trying desperately to find the nearest hair salon. But in seeking the company of women, I have had no more success in reality than in my dreams.

Last week I was stuck in a sauna with a giant male; an athlete with a hairy back and the personality of a gorilla.

There wasn't much oxygen in the room, and he kept hitting his flesh with his swimming cap.

To break the unbearable silence, I said that in other countries, they leave birch branches in the saunas, so that the men can flog the melancholy out of each other, like monks of ancient days flagellating the wickedness off their flesh.

He turned round and showed me a little plastic bottle."Do you mind if I squirt some of this on to the stones?"

"Not at all," I said. Though I don't think he would have heeded my protests if I had said that it was a little too hot for me.

"It takes the stale smell out of the air," he said, and he squirted a long trail of liquid from the bottle to the stones, which immediately sizzled like a wok in a chinese restaurant.

"Oh," I said, "that's a good smell. Is it eucalyptus?"

"No. It's Olbas."

The heat was unbearable, and he noticed I was weakening. Another squirt from his bottle, and up flew the temperature again.

Eventually I left, and he remained in the heat; a real man, with his bottle of Olbas tucked into the folds of his enormous paws.

Later, in the car park, I surveyed the 07 autos and I barely recognised him, in a linen suit, all jolly and jumpy, as he climbed into the passenger seat of a silver Merc driven by the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.