DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR - Michael Harding:I  WAS HAVING a service done to the Pajero, and the mechanic was sizing me up. "You take good care of your jeep," he said, approvingly.

I said: "I spend more money on that jeep than I do on the VHI. Especially since the accident last year."

Last year a car ran into my back wheel outside McDonald's. The driver was a young woman, with learner plates, and since I had gone a bit too fast on to the roundabout, and since there was only a tiny, millimetre-wide crack on her bumper, I volunteered to pay.

A garda was present and remarked that the repairs would hardly cost €100.

So off I went, like an eejit, and waited for her to phone. She may have described the accident to her father, because he phoned me a few days later. By then the cost of fixing the bumper had risen above €700.

Such is life in modern Mullingar, where suckers don't get any breaks, as I said to a lady friend from Cork on Saturday afternoon. A big lady who owns a head of blonde hair, Armani sunglasses, a Mercedes jeep, and is blessed with a great appetite. She ordered Moroccan lamb with couscous.

"There's too much complaining going on," she declared. "Too much passive aggression. All that phoning into radio shows and starting every sentence with phrases like 'I'm very angry because'."

She does a fair bit of complaining herself; she told me she was fed up with Irish men.

"They go around with hatchets stuck between their shoulder blades and a sign on the forehead saying: 'Look what mammy did to me.' "

"It's the Famine," I explained. "It destroyed the male psyche. Left him impotent." She stared at me. "Psychologically impotent, I hasten to add."

She said her ex-boyfriend was an impotent eco-warrior. Hugged trees and cried like a baby. The memory enraged her.

"When I think of what he was like in bed!" she exclaimed. We both paused. "Now he lives in a poky cottage, smokes a lot of dope, and invokes Catholicism as a measure of what he suffered. He's angry and he blames everyone but himself." Since he wasn't in the room, she turned her attention to me. "And despite what you say, it's not all Albertine roses, pine tables and artistic bliss in rural Ireland. Some bohemian cottages resemble medieval slums."

"I suppose some artists are struggling to survive." I admitted.

"Struggling!" she repeated. "Struggling!"

She was pointing a knife at me, slimy with Moroccan gravy. "Listen to me," she said. "There's too much dope being smoked in those badly heated hovels, with their banjaxed Stanley ranges, and cement floors sticky with food, and the sculleries stinking with black plastic bags, full of last year's rubbish. But nobody can say boo, because it's all supposed to be evidence of a cool artistic lifestyle."

There was a silence as she ruminated on this and polished off the couscous.

"I went to visit him one time," she said. "He was staying in a little colony up in the hills. A tip of broken-down caravans, with some people living in the ditches under plastic covers, and mucky infants running around naked and distressed, wondering which caravan mammy might be lying in, smoking her afternoon joint."

"Artists," she continued, and she spoke the word as if she were pronouncing the name of a maggot that ruins apples. "Artists!" Then she recalled a pub just off Patrick Street in Cork, where a lanky old man once confronted her with a profound question: how many great artists did she think had emerged out of Europe in the previous 500 years? "I didn't answer him," she said, "but when the man behind the bar had put the pint in front of me, the culchie persisted. 'I'll tell you,' he said, 'I would say there was about 50. Fifty really great artists in that entire 500 years. But,' he says, 'tis a great thing to say, that 49 of them drink in here at the weekends.' "

She accompanied me to Chartbusters, and then out into the car park. She mounted the Merc, and I the Pajero, and we zoomed off downtown in a blaze of glorious diesel, parting ways on the roundabout below the greyhound track, and beeping horns in a last farewell.

Later I watched The New World, a film about native Americans struggling with strangers, but I was still distracted by what exactly the eco-warrior had been doing, in her bed.