DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:Last Tuesday morning I went to the barber shop on Austin Friar Street for a haircut. The frost was so severe that the trees in the town park crackled as thawing ice broke the joints of small branches. It reminded me of frosty mornings long ago in Cavan, when I cycled to school, down the back road, past the golf course, and through Loreto wood.

That wood, through which young men sometimes ventured to win the hearts of boarding girls in Loreto, was always enchanting; frozen white in January, or carpeted with bluebells in late April.

On summer evenings the little wood hummed with teddyboys and beehived girls parked in Volkswagens and Ford Anglias, promising the world to each other. As a child I sometimes crept up behind those cars, like David Attenborough in search of insects, hoping that I might hear the strange guttural throat sounds that accompany human intercourse.

The best haircut I ever had was in Rome in 1985. I was staying in an apartment alone, and I couldn't understand the television news, during which a military man kept pointing a stick at some place in the Soviet Union called Chernobyl.

Then he pointed the stick at Italy. Arrows swept across the screen showing a trajectory from Chernobyl to Rome, and for a few hours I presumed the worst: that nuclear war had broken out and that the arrows meant Soviet bombers were about to enter Italian air space and blow the guts out of me and the Holy Father.

Neither internet nor mobile phones had yet been invented, so I had no way of communicating with Dublin, and it wasn't until the following morning, when I could buy an English paper, that I found out what really happened. That was the day I went to a traditional Italian barber - a shop full of open-bladed razors and linen-suited men who smelled better than young girls.

I enjoyed every minute of that belonging, and the exhilaration of the barber's cut-throat razor, as it moved across the top of my head, with the speed and dexterity of a Kerry man cutting though green lawns with the swish of a scythe.

I began to realise that the barber's shop is a sophisticated cultural institution. It is a refuge from the world. A place to be consoled by the misery of other men, and a forum for poking fun at the high and mighty.

In 19th-century Istanbul, the satiric gossip in barber shops became so subversive of the ruling order that they were closed down, just as theatres or newspapers are closed in times of revolution. And apparently, in New York, leading intellectuals often visit the barber's shop to deepen their understanding of political affairs.

The barber shops of my childhood had no such style. Dumb, non-verbal places, with lashings of Brylcreem. The barber met the customer's eyes in the mirror. A simple nod signified the customer's satisfaction. Nobody ever complained.

Why would they? They were poor, had holes in their shoes, lacked education and were smothered in a nameless inferiority. Adult men were as cheerful as babies suffocating under a damp overcoat. They sat in silence, barely able to read the paper, as the razors buzzed like noisy bees.

When a young infant was propped up in a leather chair that had so much hydraulic steel and leather straps it looked like an instrument of death, the men behind him would scorn his tears, as the razor pinched the hairs on his bare neck.

"He'll get used to it," they hissed, for they had themselves despaired of anything more in life than little rituals of humiliation.

These things kept me away from barber shops for two decades. Many years ago I bought a Ronson hair-cutting machine and devoted myself to mastering a crew cut, number one, as I squatted naked on top of two sheets of newspaper with a mirror resting on a chair.

But all that changed last Tuesday. I walked up Austin Friar Street, and at a few minutes past noon I crossed the threshold of the Barbers Shop.

Below the mirrors the bench was dressed with a spread of chrome instruments - scissors, tweezers, blades and razors - and small white towels, sterilised and steamed.

In the leather chair, I was covered by an apron. The apron's two strings were tied at the back of my neck. Long shafts of winter sunlight flooded the room, and I wallowed in the attentions of my barber, a young woman from Slovakia.