Displaced in Mullingar:From romance, to feelings of longing and loneliness, the moon stirs passion and pain, writes Michael Harding

In 1980s Dublin, heroin addicts with faces as blank as the moon regularly used the toilets of the Ilac Centre, shooting up inside locked cubicles.

Now the centre is like Paris, all coffee and buns, and the junkies have gone to the river. I spent an afternoon in the library last week, reading the newspapers. A motley collection of old men, with peaked caps, and faces gaunt enough to suggest that they lived on the clippings of tea, sat at the table with me.

I arrived back in Mullingar the following day, to find sun glistening on the black bonnets of Land Rovers around the train station. And men dressed like Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band distributing leaflets for a circus, while a jazz ensemble in tattered dinner suits played swing on the back of a stationary lorry, opposite the Market House, their expressions replete with the disturbing gaze of unhappy clowns.

All week there was a stretch in the evenings, and the moon waxed towards its full glory. A ghost in the empty sky, spilling milky moonshine on the manicured lawns of suburban Mullingar.

In Leitrim there was no surprise to the moon's existence. It fitted well with mountain and lake. It lit up the bog. I remember one night at a removal in the local church, the moon sneaked in a gothic window and added an eerie light to the tin whistle resting on top of a young boy's coffin.

When the moon was eclipsed in Mullingar, four weeks ago, I happened to be just leaving the dog track after watching greyhounds run round in circles. People on the street gawked at the sky. A woman called my mobile. I asked her could she see the Earth's shadow.

She saw it alright.

"I still miss my wee boy," she said.

It was the moon that made her think of his cold white body on the marble slab.

A truck driver once gave me a lift across the Alps. At Chamonix we watched the moon rise above Mont Blanc. He cried because he couldn't bear to live with the woman he had married. Whatever was eating him continued for years, and he died young, on the streets of Liverpool, out of luck and out of love.

The Mullingar moon turned up at a dinner party during the week. A flood of silver light on the slates of a roof across the street. The guests observed it through a lattice window and were instantly stirred with romance.

A woman leaned over to me during the coffee and said, "I heard that you like Emmylou Harris."

"I do," said I.

Suddenly she sang a verse of a love-song.

"Wow," I said, "where's your husband?"

I was joking.

But she said, without blinking, that it wasn't her husband she was singing about.

"That must be difficult," I said.

"No," she said, "that's the bit that makes everything else easy."

On Sunday morning I saw a little woman in a red coat, on Mary Street in Mullingar, halted beside a silver steel bollard, on which someone had tied a white bridal balloon.

She poked it with her stick, and then gave it a good clatter and shouted, "It's all over now!" The little white balloon looked as sad as a moon shot down.

In Fermanagh they used to tell a story about a fellow who travelled to the end of the Earth. Eventually he came up against the sky. And he cut a small hole with his knife, and thrust his head through, just to see what was on the other side. But there was only a pile of old moons, like a stack of hay. That's what he saw. On the other side of the blue. A pile of old moons.

After my day in the Ilac, I booked into a hostel. The foyer was jammed with backpackers. Waiting to check in, I stood behind a girl from Beijing.

She had tiny feet in small leather slippers, and behind black hair, her ears were adorned with silver rings.

I felt like a walrus, washed up on the wrong beach.

The night porter wanted her passport. Wanted proof of her identity. But I knew exactly who she was.

She was somebody's daughter. Some old man who waved farewell, as she stepped out in her little shoes to travel to the end of the Earth. Some man who works late in Beijing, and looks up at the full moon and sees exactly what I see.