Displaced in Mullingar:Things are heating up for spring, writes Michael Harding.

During January, I felt like a mouse on an exercise wheel. Hours on the Walk-Master in the gym, glued to Oprah, who spoke to me through earphones, from a flat screen on the wall. But this week shops have put pink and red hearts in the windows to alert the people of Mullingar that spring is coming, and love is in the air.

Theatre people are often referred to as luvvies, but in my experience you cannot write a single line if you are not in love. And I don't think it's possible to walk onto a stage and offer an audience your heart without love in the equation. The heart might be broken. The actor might be trapped in a life of mental torment. But to walk out of a dressing room, across the no-man's land of backstage, and into the light, is, in itself, an act of generosity and love.

Strolling around Mullingar this week, I noticed that the icy glare of winter shoppers had thawed. Faces had that pleased expression which suggests that they've already seen crocus shoots in their back gardens.

In the waiting room of the train station there was a girl in silver shoes, blue jeans and a tight cream top. She wore a pink belt, studded with glass beads. The waiting room was particularly warm and cosy. Her coat lay in a black bundle on the floor, and her head was resting on the shoulder of a gangly, gawky lad, who seemed confused by such tenderness.

Uptown, in a coffee shop, a young girl was squeezing one of her boyfriend's blackheads between her two pink thumbnails. He sat as still and obedient as a labrador with the vet. At another table, two fat men were sitting in speechless excitement. One of them had a moustache. The other one kept jiggling his leg on the stool like an over-excited schoolboy.

"I am moving in tomorrow," he whispered. "Valentine's night, I'm gonna take her out and treat her like a queen!" It's a long time since I sweated my shirt off at Lavey Carnival, but with that romantic energy going around the coffee shops, I couldn't resist a night on the town.

I started in Byrnes, a swanky bar and restaurant. It is dimly lit, with lots of red upholstery, and has the feel of a plush nightclub. Wealthy young dudes in suits were gathered in the soft lighting, confidently bantering with young women in cocktail dresses. I noted a bottle of champagne on ice at the counter. And when somebody asked for a glass of wine the barman poured it from a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape. The proximity of such elegance had an unsettling effect on my emotions, so I fled up the street in search of tranquillity.

Mojo's is a clubby bar at the rear of the Mullingar House. And if any pub sizzles like a frying pan with the sexual energy of young people on the verge of spontaneous combustion, then it's not Mojo's. Mojo's is the fire.

The place was ablaze with athletic thighs, micro-skirts, knee-high boots and other accoutrements of disco-ready battledress.

Reciting the four Noble Truths of Buddhism, I made an instant withdrawal. I was more at home in the Old Stand. The clientele were all fully dressed. Nothing to raise the blood pressure, apart from one old man who clung to the counter, as if it was the side of a boat in a storm. He was having small conversations with himself.

Things were quieter down the back. A coal fire blazed, and a black cat stared at me, as if he had been waiting for me all his life. Feeling as pleased as Goldilocks when she found the right bed, I ordered a pint. I like an open fire. So do cats.

A century ago, the waiting room at Mullingar station had two fire grates. In one, a few miserable coals smouldered away beneath a hill of damp slack, which the stationmaster replenished, every time a train was expected. The waiting passengers shivered with cold. The paupers stood outside on the platform, with empty stomachs, before travelling to Dublin in cattle trucks.

But the cat in the Old Stand hadn't a care in the world. He yawned.

I supped my pint, and considered other nuances of Asian philosophy; that it is good to be alive, and better, to be in love. The cat watched me, and the fire burned.