Displaced in Mullingar:Unanswerable questions, colds, melancholy, haunting the kitchen twilight - Michael Hardingfalls victim to the January blues

Each New Year I am bamboozled by the same question: "Who am I?" And there is no answer but that I am someone who likes soap operas, Hillary Clinton, Pride and Prejudice, and cats.

It's always the same in January - I catch a cold, and then grow sad and melancholic. Something inside me fragments into tiny pieces. As an English poet once said, I get pushed to the edge of my own life. I remain indoors, hovering on the landing in my dressing gown, haunting the empty kitchen, and emotionally disabled.

While my friends pursue enlightenment through psychotherapy or exotic rituals concocted from dream journeys and New Age wisdom, I just slouch on the sofa and watch girls in lacy frocks emoting in BBC dramas about life before electricity.

Recently, I found myself at an art exhibition. It was a collection of pretty pictures - sunsets, forest walks, blue mountains and many more skilled representations of the beautiful earth as seen by decent people who have shaped their lives coherently, found succour in good professions, and are blessed to find time at weekends to celebrate it all in acrylic and oil.

For some reason, I was taken by a tiny drawing of a cat's face. It stared at me, and I stared back. And I felt that it was a depressed cat, though this may be some kind of shadow my '"unconscious" was projecting.

My debilitation does not make me angry. I do not rage against the dark, or the establishment, or the disorder of the cosmos. I just blunder around in the kitchen twilight, frustrated because I went to the supermarket and forgot to get toilet rolls.

Cats make me think of Alina. Two months ago she was terrified that the terms of her new lease might leave her with no other option but to employ a vet, in order to execute her beloved pet, Kotka.

The good news is that three girls, who share a house, invited her to take the smallest bedroom, and keep her cat, so long as it doesn't get up on the tables or worktops. I'm glad she didn't have to go to the vet.

It's not a pleasant thing, doing away with the beloved.

I brought a cat to the vet in a large-sized biscuit tin when I was a child. The vet said: "Just leave it there."

"But I want to be here until the end," I explained.

He was neither amused nor disturbed. So he let me watch as he poured liquid on to a large ball of cotton wool and tossed it into the tin and closed the lid. It was only then that he noticed that I had punctured holes in the lid, in order to let the cat breathe.

He hissed like a snake with rage and quickly got adhesive tape to seal the punctured lid, though it was too late. Enough air had already leaked into the tin to allow the little cat believe that struggling might succeed.

I stood there aghast, as the biscuit tin rattled on the floor and the old cat flailed around inside, writhing ferociously but without success.

Eventually there was silence and stillness, and I asked the vet what I should do next. He said I should go home.

I didn't tell Alina my cat story. I don't know her well enough. I am just a shadow on the periphery of her life, a kind of scarecrow in the distance.

Come to think about it, I have never told anyone how I felt that day. If Francis Bacon was alive, and sitting beside me on a stool in Finn's Bar, I'd tell him, because I've seen his paintings when they were in Dublin a few years ago, and I'm certain he would understand.

I have friends who go to rural cottages, and climb mountains after Christmas. They are among the contented few who realise that life means something. By driving their station wagons across the Shannon and spending time in rustic pubs, where they can smell the turf, they fancy that they are stepping into the real centre of life.

Transfigured by the turf smoke into beings bloated with meaning, they probably pity me, bewildered in Mullingar, where the modern world assaults me in its terrible fragmented dissonance.

Perhaps they are right. And perhaps that's why Alina clings to her cat.

Perhaps that's why so many children from eastern Europe survive in Mullingar, thanks only to their turtles, and parrots, and other secret creatures they hide from the landlord.