Washing machines, life cycles and the cleavage of Meath

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I LOVE THE sound of a washing machine. It feels like there's someone else in the house. Especially when it spins and begins to whine like a sean-nós singer getting sick.

Not that I use it very often. I tend to abandon dirty clothes wherever they fall, which leads to problems when I run out of underwear.

Briefs, vests and socks are so cheap nowadays that it is easier to buy new ones rather than waste money on washing powder. But then the new stuff gets dirty, and in time ends up adding to the laundry mountain.

I have been aware for many years that the raiment of a beautiful woman can be enticing to a male. I remember times in my student days when a naked bra hanging out of the laundry basket in my beloved’s bathroom would have driven me wild with desire.

So who is to say that some young lady might not knock on my door to gain support for the Lisbon Treaty, or for Ógra Fianna Fáil, and then might want to use the loo, and then might be overwhelmed with desire, and thrust herself upon me in uncontrollable passion, just because my gym gear was lying all over the bathroom floor.

That kind of emotional intensity is something I’ld prefer to avoid, at my age, for health reasons.

And a friend actually said to me recently that he didn’t feel comfortable dunking ginger nut biscuits in a kitchen dominated by my personal items.

So last week, when the skies were blue, I decided to spend a day working my way through the washing.

I began at 7am. The machine was never off, and by the end of the day there was a great pile of fresh garments on the kitchen table, which I then moved out to the lines in the garden.

Farmers had been baling silage earlier in the day, on the hill across the road, and the grass had been shaved down to a wispy yellow colour, with dozens of black plastic bales lying scattered around the empty field like giant black stones.

But as I pegged my clothes to the line I thought I could still hear the baling machines. Then I looked up and saw a helicopter hovering above me.

Apparently the gardaí had been chasing gunmen on the Ballymahon Road. The escaping car crashed a short distance from my house, and one of the men ran into a field, with the gardaí in hot pursuit.

Of course, Mullingar was always an unruly place. Few people realise that the county of Meath was all one territory as far as Athlone, until 1542, when an Act of Parliament partitioned it, creating the county of Westmeath.

“Forasmuch as the Shire of Meath is great and large,” the Act stated, “and the West part thereof beset with rebels, and that in several parts the Kings writs have not of late been obeyed, it is thought meet that the said Shire should be divided and made into two.” The swanky bit remained as Meath, and the unruly end became Westmeath.

I got that history lesson the following morning, as I drank coffee with a friend in the Park Hotel.

He’s 61, and is broken-hearted by the loss of his wife. After she died last year he took up the piano.

I asked was he any good.

He said no.

He sits in his drawing room, the same one he shared with her for 30 years, and plays the scales.

He said, “You know, I should practice more.”

I said “You’re 61; it’s time to stop practising.”

“She died a year ago,” he said, “but the good weather last week reminded me of the time we cycled around Kerry in 1994.”

He first met her when he was cycling on the Tullamore Road in 1958. She had a puncture. That autumn he invited her to a concert.

“It was the Hallé Orchestra,” he said. “They were playing Elgar – in Mullingar. Imagine that!”

Last year they went to the National Concert Hall for the first time, and about a week afterwards she was outside Supervalu, waiting to collect her sister from the bus, when she took the turn.

“It was so sudden,” he said, “like an amputation; I didn’t even know how to use the washing machine when she was gone.”

mharding@irishtimes.com