Displaced in Mullingar:make music while you can, for their are portents of global catastrophe in the local canal, writes Michael Harding

Last week I met an old friend on the street. He was on his way south, to a flute-maker, to collect an instrument.

I said: "I didn't know you played." He said: "Have you time for a coffee?" I said: "I do." So we did. And then he told me something I never knew, in all the days we spent as classmates.

He loved music, but he hated school. And in those years, he refused to play a single tune. Like the Israelites displaced in Babylon, he could not make music in an alien place.

My own school days were full of fear.

I survived, but others didn't. Their lives became an endless and friendless search for locked doors behind which they could stare at the wall, exhausted with unresolved rage.

A few jumped into the empty air from high buildings in later life, and I've often been suspicious that all the grief they got in school was the invisible hand pushing them over the edge.

But since life is sweeter in the remembrance of things than in the actual experience, my friend and I spoke with a cheerful nostalgia.

We had a delicious quiche in the Courtyard Restaurant, and recalled a day when we both witnessed a boy being walloped on the head by an angry teacher.

"You're stupid," the teacher said. "You're an animal! You'd ate manure!" The last comment was the most cutting; not just because it drew guffaws from the other students, but because the boy was from a particularly poor background, and the thought of him eating manure was the perfect caricature of his poverty.

There was always plenty of music in places where the land was daub and rock, and where there was nothing to sow in the wind or the mist.

Music mattered to poor people. If there was nothing to be proud of in the fields of rush and goat willow, then at least a man could find some dignity making tunes by the fireside.

A woman with nothing on the dresser, except a few cracked Belleek china plates, could always turn the kitchen into a royal palace by taking the concertina out of the press. And in the stony moonscape of Connemara, where wood was scarce, even the voice became an instrument, crying out the wounds of the poor, in sounds as forlorn as the cry of moon bears in China, that are tortured slowly to extract the bile from their entrails.

My friend seemed on top of the world with the prospect of heading off next week to the Summer School in Drumshanbo, with his reconditioned flute. He will join hundreds of other musicians next Monday, gathered like flocks of confused geese in bad weather, at the registration desk inside the main door of the Vocational School.

"Are you happy in Mullingar?" he inquired. I said it was too early to tell.

We shook hands on the street, and he went for the car-park, as I headed towards the hardware store to get a key cut.

"Hello," says I, to the hardware man, "could you cut me a key?" He looked me straight in the eye, and said with contentment worthy of the Dalai Lama: "I could cut you 10 keys."

I went home along the canal, dreaming of old musicians; men who subordinated their passions to the discipline of jigs; women who weaved tunes as delicate as embroidered curtains on their concertinas.

Old bony ghouls with skeletal fingers clasped around fiddles and bows, and as shy as deer, who hid behind doors, in the sheds, and at the gable of every house.

The wind was coming from the west, and I stood gazing with amazement at huge waves running on the canal water; a phenomenon that suddenly convinced me of the imminence of global catastrophe.

The climate probably is changing, and the Ireland where women were hidden behind embroidered curtains has come to an end. Catholicism is a withered branch, even in the laneways of Leitrim, so I suppose the Joe Mooney Summer School in Drumshanbo may be the last remaining sign of permanence in an impermanent universe.

On my way home I picked up my usual spice pudding in the butchers and commented to him that we were in for another afternoon of torrential rain.

In the apartment I poked under the bed, among the dusty things, until I found the old flute case.

I opened it, and assembled the flute, and began to blow a big long note.