When small talk about the spuds wasn't small potatoes

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I WAS ATTRACTED to the sound of bells as a boy, and to the smell of incense in the early mornings, when frost made the pavements slippy on the way to the cathedral. In those days the pews were stuffed with devotional women during Lent and I was frequently squashed, rather pleasantly, between the lardy rumps of stout ladies in brown overcoats.

I think the squashing may have blended with the opaque rituals on the altar and created in me a feeling of wellbeing, which misdirected my entire life towards the pursuit of an unknowable God, and left me in middle age playing slow airs on the flute with unbearable melancholy.

I was reminded of those stout women last week when I was on the road to Castlepollard, and an enormous countrywoman with a red plastic shopping basket flagged me down.

When I came to Mullingar two years ago I picked up nobody. At that time I was driving a little Ford Ka that people said wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding, but since I now swank about in a Mitsubishi Pajero, I couldn't resist giving her a lift.

She had a green overcoat and she could barely move herself up into the jeep, because her joints were so stiff and she carried such a lot of weight.

I said: "It's not great weather." She furrowed her brow, stared out the front window, and put so much effort into formulating a reply that I thought for a moment English might not be her native tongue.

"Well," she said, "August was no good, and June was no good, but May was fair enough." She told me that it was her second time in town that day.

"I forgot my potatoes," she said. "I had to go back for them. Three miles there, and three miles back; I suppose that would be six miles. Wouldn't it?"

"Yes."

"The sister said to do plenty of exercise," she continued, "'Cos I'm on tablets this three months. But I'm getting better."

We drove a few miles in silence until we came to her turn. As she clutched the basket on her knees I could see a naggin of whiskey sitting on top of the potatoes.

"The bar trade is finished," she said. "But what the barman is losing, the off-licence is gaining. This is me turn. Isn't that the truth?" She got out, and waved, as I drove on alone.

Potatoes used to be the essential topic of conversation when I was hitching lifts around the country in the 1970s. Wearing sandals, short trousers and gaily coloured T-shirts, it was essential to reassure local farmers in their little Anglias that I was a real male.

The two best ways to do this were to offer the driver a cigarette, and to question him on his spuds. "That's a day for the blight. Have ye sprayed yet? Do you set Queens in this part of the country?"

In fact, I knew little about potatoes. I was 10 before I first saw them come out of the black powdery soil of a garden in Dublin, where my uncle forked away the stalks, and I, with two boyish hands, scooped them up from the clay and thought them as lovely and wonderful as a duck's egg.

I tried to grow them in Leitrim one year, but in a world where a man's character was often measured by the straightness of his ridges or the impeccable flowering of his green stalks, I didn't try it twice.

The great thing about potatoes is that you can boil them without having to stir them, which is the bit I dislike about pasta, because I often practise the flute when I'm making the dinner, and pasta can completely scramble a jig, if you're up and down like a yo-yo to stir the pot.

I must have watched thousands of potatoes boil in my lifetime, as I struggled with the notes of simple jigs.

I learned to play the flute at 40, when I discovered that my life was in decline, and when my religious faith finally turned to nostalgia; but it was as a child that I learned the tin whistle, and played it, often with tears of sorrow running down my cheeks, in the unhappy world of childhood, where there were few consolations beyond the austere and empty vault of Cavan Cathedral.

mharding@irish-times.ie