Displaced in Mullingar It's comforting to know that there are thousands of jeep-driving, blonde goddesses in sunglasses, writes Michael Harding

There's a great line in Marina Carr's play, Woman and Scarecrow, about domestic appliances.

"Why didn't you have more sex?" Scarecrow asks the woman as she nears the end of her life. To which the woman replies, "I was too busy hoovering."

I thought of it last week, when I saw Gráinne outside Harvey Norman.

She was carrying a Black and Decker vacuum cleaner.

Gráinne is what people used to call a tonic. Whenever I'm feeling a bit low I have a cappuccino with her. She's a mother of two, with a shiny black jeep, and sunglasses. I've often asked her about the sunglasses: they seem de rigueur, as jeepwear for the matrons of Mullingar.

We had lunch in the Courtyard Kitchen, a homely restaurant tucked away in a sidestreet below the cathedral.

She had soup and I had quiche.

I said, "It's getting cold in Mullingar. The windscreen of the jeep gets iced up these mornings. There was no ice on the windscreens in Leitrim." She said, "You're out early." I said, "I like to drive out the road and look at the big beech trees in the fog, before the sun breaks through."

And even though the nights are freezing cold, my house seems unusually warm. It must be all the other houses huddled around in close proximity.

I'm going through only half a bale of briquettes on the coldest of nights, whereas in Leitrim I was shovelling on a full bucket of Arigna coal every hour.

Gráinne asked me how I was getting on with the big telly. I told her that since I can now actually see Fair City, I find it a horrid poor excuse for drama.

It didn't seem so awful on a small screen that was fuzzy and flecked with green lines. But now, watching it in 32-inch digital clarity, I am convinced that the moment is coming when the number of viewers will dwindle to a last solitary fan, still hanging on, like a watchman for daybreak. Maybe then the electricians will pull the plug.

Gráinne said, "Too much telly is bad for a man." I said, "Too much hoovering is bad for a woman."

"Do you know," I said, "I imagine I meet you everywhere. I keep seeing this black jeep, this woman with blonde hair and sunglasses, and I always think it's you.

"I was convinced I saw you on Saturday, in a Humvee, purring like a cat outside Super Valu: the woman driver had blonde hair, shades like yours, and she waved at me.

"The thing is that since Mullingar women discovered blonde hair and sunglasses, and sit behind the wheels of black jeeps, I have to look at the registration plates to figure out who it is. It wasn't you. Was it?"

Gráinne explained that women feel safer in jeeps.

Her daughter is in UCG, where the students' union operates a "walking bus". When students are leaving the library, or going into town after dark, they can assemble at various points on the hour, so that they don't have to walk alone.

For dessert we had home-made bread pudding, and when the lady came over with it, she placed the dishes before us with a phrase as comforting as the gurgle of milk; "Mind the plates," she said, "they're hot." Half way through the bread pudding, Gráinne took off her sunglasses.

It was as if she were suddenly naked. I delighted in her beautiful hazel eyes, at last unveiled.

She said, "Do you see the woman over by the window?" I did.

"Well," she said, "Do you know who she is?" I didn't.

She mentioned a famous gentleman on television.

I said, "It doesn't look at all like him!" "No no," she said, "that's the Mammy!" On the street outside, she put her glasses back on. They made her look like a fly, or something out of a science fiction movie.

It's a beautiful mask, and truly enigmatic, because I haven't a clue whether her smiling lips mean boredom or desire, and the ambiguity is tantalising.

And it makes me happy to know that she is a goddess, and that she is everywhere; that there are a thousand versions of her, cruising around the motorways, roundabouts and housing estates of Mullingar.

Mother Macree, after surviving the masculine claws of her tiger cubs, has re-emerged, not as the "floury-faced ould wan in the kitchen", but as a yummy mummy, in clothes from Khan or Cocoon, and smothered in Christian Dior.