Displaced in Mullingar: the drab modernity of Modern Ireland is swept away for Michael Hardingin the elegance of a ballroom

When I was 22, I bought a grey Austin A40 with a mahogany dashboard, and drove it up into the mountains of west Cavan. I abandoned suburbia, and crossed into a world where everyone was heroic, and each deed was epic, and the enormous mountain gripped every insignificant creature in a savage and mythic embrace.

While others worked out their existential angst in urban flats, wallowing in the metaphysics of Leonard Cohen, I was quick-stepping around Glangevlin Hall. Listening to Charlie Pride in the middle of the night in cozy kitchens and country farmhouses. I would go out on the lawn to smoke Albany cigarettes, because outside, the moonlit mountain was magnificent, and I felt cousin to the goats bleating on the rocks, and the badgers that waddled the roads unhindered by any combustion engine.

The love songs of shy girls, the heroic recitations of daft old men with radioactive noses, and the long winter nights full of riddles, conundrums and the Best of Hank Williams, seduced my heart. It was a labyrinth of fun, from which there was little chance of recovery.

Sometimes I wander around Mullingar like Prospero, shipwrecked in the drab modernity of the New Ireland. Belonging is not possible in a secular world. But at other times I just feel like a good jive.

They still jive in the Greville Arms Hotel on Sunday nights, in a wonderfully faded ballroom, with elegance reminiscent of Fred Astaire, dancing in black and white, on the Sunday afternoon television of my childhood.

A mannered world of chandeliers, wigs, flashy jackets, and well-shod ladies in trouser suits, gold necklaces, and strong mascara. And in the quiet corners, softly lit, grey-haired old men open their hearts in whispered conversation, with women who've been waiting for decades. An intimate tiptoe time, as delicate as a foxtrot.

Though some dancers are old, and their bodies sag, there is a weightlessness in their expressions. The singers wear suits of blue. And everyone is full of expectation.

For a while I sat admiring a mature lady on the dance floor, in the din and the glare, with pride in her stride, and a little too much rouge on her cheeks. She tilted her head back. She couldn't give a damn. And boy could she jive, on the floor of the Greville Arms Hotel.

A woman asked me was I ever in the Marquee at Drumlish. I said I think that's a song.

"Oh by jingo it is," she said, her eyes wistful, and watering, "It's a song alright."

For some reason Texas came up in conversation.

"D'ye know," she said, "If I got the chance to go to Texas, I'd never come back."

I wondered why.

At first she couldn't say. She thought about it.

"The horses maybe," she said. "The horses."

I asked her did she remember the Hank Williams song about a horse. A terrible disappointment flooded into her eyes, and she said, "No. No I never liked Hank Williams." And then she drifted away.

The boy to my left leaned towards me and said, "I heard ye quizzing yer wan about Texas."

"Yes," I said. "We were just chatting."

"Well," he said, "I've got every single song Hank Williams ever recorded."

He looked me in the eye and began to recite: "One man's back is another man's face. One man's tree is another man's post. One man's angel is another man's ghost."

Then he winked at me and said;

"D'ye know what I'm saying?"

I confessed I didn't.

It was like being on the Titanic. They must have hit the iceberg years ago but just didn't notice.

And then at last, fortified by Guinness, and in thrall to the glittering lights, I agreed to dance.

"Listen," she said, "forget about Hank Williams, I'm asking ye, can ye jive?"

I was about to say No, but I could hear a voice, whispering Yes. Yes, of course I could jive.

"And quick step as well," said the ghost at my shoulder, in the Greville Arms Hotel.

And so finally, after long years of rational thought, I let go again, and into an ocean of perfume, across a sea of buckskin shirts, I jived with a stranger. A lovely lady who reminded me of nobody in particular. And when we were finished, she said, very demurely, that I jived extremely well. I thanked her kindly, saying that it was indeed, my pleasure.

mharding@irish-times.ie