In search of The Queen of Snow in leather boots

Displaced in Mullingar: disorientated by Casualtyand Swan Lake, Michael Hardingescapes to Krakow to find out whatever happened to Polish blondes.

There was a woman behind the counter, speaking Polish on her mobile. Not that Polish sounds any better than English, but sometimes I project ideas of what is beautiful on to an unreachable object.

As I devoured a blueberry muffin, I was writing into her voice, the embodiment of all my longing.

And because I love snow, I imagined her at home in Poland; alone on some Soviet-style street in Nowa Huta, surrounded by hillocks of dirty slush, blue trams and the standstill of time. The Queen of Snow in leather boots.

I imagined me and her dining in a pizza place, on the corner of Solidarnosci Street. The two of us getting along like a house on fire.

Suddenly Poland was the land of my heart's desire; a fantasy world of white lotus petal, a paradise of snowy mountains.

That's a lot of daydreaming on one muffin.

I tried to explain it to a male friend on Saturday evening.

We watched Casualty, a drama set in a hospital emergency room staffed by heroic nurses in blue uniforms. One particular nurse, who never gets along with anyone else, was having a bad day. So bad that when she went home to her lonely little diary, in her lonely little room, she hanged herself.

My friend and I were stunned as we watched her feet, in little pink socks, floating above the bed. Even if it was only fiction, the drama disturbed us. We were both fans of the shy medic whose life in the television serial had ended so abruptly.

Still, despite the trauma, I opened another bottle of wine, and cajoled my friend into watching a DVD of Swan Lake. I thought it would help us cheer up.

But halfway through Swan Lake, he said: "Is there nothing better on?" I said: " Swan Lakeis tragic. It's beautiful. It's a poem about our human frailty." He said: "It's like watching ducks dancing backwards." I said: "I prefer to see it as art. The dancers embody something of our soul. We see ourselves in the mythic colour of their graceful motion. So in a sense, part of me is a swan in Swan Lake." I was merely trying to explain how I read a work of art.

He said: "You're sick." He said: "They're all women!" "No," I said, "they're all swans!" I think that was after the third bottle of wine.

Then I announced that I was going to Poland. "In Poland," I declared, "there will be lots of women who adore Swan Lake. In Poland I will probably go to Swan Lakeevery night of the week!" He said he was in Krakow once, on a midweek break. He said he noticed a lot of women with dark hair.

"Here, women want to be blonde," he said, "because they're not. In Poland, all the blonde girls dye their hair black." I said: "You're only trying to upset me. I just think that Swan Lakeis much better than Casualty. A ballerina in white feathers is more stimulating than an actress in pink socks." After that, we had mugs of tea, with thick slices of bread, to bring the night to a graceless conclusion.

On Monday I was on the 7.30am to Krakow, and found myself in an aisle seat beside a woman wearing denim jeans and pointy-toed boots. We didn't speak.

That evening I went to an operetta called A Lottery for Husbands, during which a chorus of 20 women in white dresses stood on the stage and sang about the balls in a lottery drum.

It was a far cry from Swan Lake, and the principal soprano had hair as red as a stove of coal. On the second evening I went to a jazz bar on the big square in the old town, where the only remarkable dome was the bald and shining head of a clarinet player.

But on the third night I discovered a cool pub in the Jewish quarter.

The door was of rusted iron, the walls of flaking bricks. The blacked-out windows were plastered with posters for punk bands.

In the smoke-filled cavern a waitress with black eyebrows looked through me. She had magnificent dreadlocks as black as a raven's wings.

I asked her were the dreadlocks real. She said they were stuck on.

"Is your hair dyed?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "But underneath, it is all blonde." She smiled through the smoke as she poured the bottle of Tyskie into my empty glass.