DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:ONE NIGHT a young singer was strumming her guitar as we waited for pizzas. I could hear the wood crackling in the fire. We were in the drawing room of a magnificent Celtic Tiger house; a piano in the corner, violently out of tune. There was just myself and herself and our host, a man slightly older than me, writes MIcheal Harding.

The pizzas arrived and the meal began. I went out to the kitchen to dispose of the pizza boxes, but couldn’t find anywhere obvious.

I returned and asked our host where would I put the rubbish. I said: “You have no bin.”

He said: “I know. Just throw them in the plastic bag on the worktop.”

“I gave up bins,” he went on. “My marriage broke up because of a bin.”

“We used to have this big dustbin in the kitchen,” he explained, “for the rubbish. And there was always a big black bag in it; a jumbo bag, bigger than the bin. It made it easy to toss rubbish into it, because it was bigger than the bin. Do you understand?”

I said: “I do.”

“Well, one day the wife replaced it with a white bag, a smaller bag. So it didn’t fit, and I was annoyed, but she didn’t see the point. And so I changed it to a black bag again, and went off to work, and when I came back, there was another white bag stuck in the bin.”

I said: “Surely that didn’t cause a divorce?”

He said: “You’d be surprised what causes divorce. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The final crack in the ceiling or the floor or whatever!”

He tore his pizza slice asunder with bare teeth. He was oozing with remorse. I suppose he realised that it was foolish to destroy a marriage for the sake of a plastic bag.

Then the young singer suggested we should cheer up.

“Valentine’s night is next Saturday,” she said. And so she told us a story.

“Once upon a time there was a princess who fell in love with a shepherd. She was weaving a cloth for her father at that time, and the shepherd was a big distraction. So her father, being very angry, banished the pair of them to opposite ends of the universe – one to the west, one to the east – where they remain to this day, as stars in the sky.

“But lovebirds made a bridge across the sky. They spread their wings and created a foggy ribbon, known as the Milky Way, so that the two lovers could embrace once a year. And guess what kind of birds created the Milky Way?”

I said: “I couldn’t imagine.”

“Magpies!” she said.

I said: “I know a great Sligo group called No Crows – they have a CD called Magpie!”

Our host said he couldn’t stand magpies. “They bully the other birds.”

The three of us stared into the fire again.

“She left me last July,” our host said after a while. “Went off with a drummer.”

His eyes were like buckets of water. Maybe he was looking for sympathy, but he wasn’t getting any. He was working through his pizza very slowly. I asked the young singer to give us another song.

“Twas down by the Salley Gardens,” she began, sean-nós, without even lifting the guitar, “my love and I did meet.”

When she was finished I said to her: “I bet you’ll be getting lots of Valentine cards.”

Our host said: “If you ask me, Valentine’s Day is a rip-off.”

The singer asked him did he ever send anyone a Valentine’s card.

He said: “No.”

She was annoyed. She stared at him and he couldn’t bear the silence and her watchful eyes, so he went out and made tea. “That’s a very grumpy man,” she said, when he was gone.

He came back with three mugs, and a carton of milk balanced on a breadboard.

“Of course I gave her cards,” he said. “She was my wife. What would you expect?”

Then the singer ventured a further song; a song about love lasting forever, and love that never dies. “That was beautiful,” I said when she was finished.

“Aye,” said the grumpy man, “beautiful! But let me tell you this: nothing lasts forever.”

He flung the crust of his pizza into the flames and the three of us listened as it sizzled.

mharding@irishtimes.com