An interval with a stranger leads to long deep thoughts

Displaced in Mullingar: Middle-aged men live in a state of melancholic unease, lifted by rare moments of high-jinks, writes Michael Harding

I was in Galway last Tuesday, teaching at the university. It's always a thrill to be close to young people. Especially where the light of the ocean plays games with the heart.

I stayed in a swanky hotel for two nights. It had a large gym the size of a function room, with lots of treadmills and weight machines, and televisions on the walls.

At 9am there were a few women pumping and grunting, and treading the machines with the vigour of camogie players training for an All-Ireland.

And in the men's locker room, there were about six middle-aged, pot-bellied English men, standing around the showers, stark naked, as they cracked jokes about business matters, and the price of Aer Arann tickets from Manchester.

That evening I went to the theatre. I sat behind a tall woman in a green dress. She loved the show. So did I. At the interval I got chatting to her, and I mentioned that I actually knew someone in the cast. She was enormously impressed, and for the rest of the night, I couldn't concentrate on anything but the smooth nape of her neck and the strands of her raven black hair.

I fled the theatre at the end of the show, heading out the door before the last applause had died down. I feared I might do or say something silly, and so I chose to have a nightcap alone, at the hotel bar.

But half an hour later, still in the green dress, and with an elegant red mohair shawl around her shoulders, she strode into the bar, ordered a pint, and planted herself on the high stool beside me.

"Are you a resident?" I asked, as if that had anything to do with me! But she answered without hesitation.

"Yes," she said, "I'm in room 103." We had a charming conversation about how people frequently get locked out of their rooms in hotels in the middle of the night.

I said I could recall at least three occasions in the old days when it happened to me. The worst was in the Great Southern. I was with a partner on the third floor and waddled to the toilet in a state of semi-consciousness, only to discover that I had walked out of the room, letting the door close behind me.

There I stood, naked, knocking, louder and louder, until a lady in a room opposite opened her door, and said in an irate voice; "Now you have everyone awake!" Well not quite true! My partner was inside the locked door, snoring like a bulldozer going up a hill in reverse. I had to brave the long stairs down to reception with a pot plant in hand, and there plead my case with the night porter.

The woman in the green dress, finished her pint, and walked away towards the lift. She was heading for room 103. I remained another 10 minutes, for appearances sake, with the dregs of a pint.

I have met a lot of men in life that push themselves too hard. People who try to be right all the time; who cannot abide making mistakes; pushing themselves against the brick of the wall, until the blood pressure starts to squeeze the heart muscles.

I knew a man who ate his dinners in a state of terrible agitation; enduring unbearable loneliness in the company of others, and forking food down his gullet with such ferocity, that his wife offered it as the reason why she eventually divorced him.

Some men jog to death, while others consume bottles of whiskey late in the night until the liver gives in. Men have odd ways of taking revenge on the past.

The fact is that middle-aged men live in a constant state of melancholic unease, which is only lifted by rare moments of extravagant high-jinks, at weddings or family engagements, or business conferences in faraway hotels, where they completely lose the run of themselves.

And yet here I was in Galway, wanting to lose the run of myself, and thinking

that the kindness of a woman in a green dress might be an invitation to sweep her off her feet.

Did she hope I would knock on her door, or dial her number? Was she at that moment unzipped on her bed in room 103? I'll never know.

My own room was 215, on the second landing. I climbed the stairs alone, and began to admit the mistakes of a lifetime, behind my own closed door.