Displaced in Mullingar: A social faux pas sends Michael Hardingscurrying for his jeep, but even there he can't save himself from his actions.

Last week I was at a posh dinner party. A mansion surrounded by flat fields, tall beech trees, and the occasional chestnut, bouncing into watery green bloom. The evening sun lit up the green lawns and the low red-bricked walls around the tiled patio.

The company included a businessman, a beautiful actress, who stopped everyone in their tracks with her rendition of Ride On, and the lead singer from a rock band. One guest had a house in Italy.

Even before the cocktails were finished, I was over-excited. As we moved inside for the main course - a fish cooked to a Spanish recipe - I was dangerously flushed with Gordon's gin.

There was a blonde-haired woman at the table. I could not take my eyes off her. She moved about as if sleepwalking. And long after the desserts and coffee, as music played in the lounge, and animated guests sat around a table just inside the patio, discussing nurses, I approached her.

She was in the kitchen slicing lemons. I placed a wok on my head and petitioned her to smile for an errant knight. She may not have read Cervantes, but even Don Quixote wearing a shaving basin instead of a helmet could not have appeared so pathetic.

I slurred my admiration for her beauty, as she twisted the lemon into her glass at the kitchen worktop, and the drops fell one by one. I made melancholy lament for my lost youth, and gushed about her feminine charms, and particularly her ear lobes, upon which I had focused, much to her annoyance. "Take that wok off your head," she said, "It's not funny." She walked away towards the lounge with ice clinking in two crystal glasses.

I was sick for three days afterwards, and too embarrassed to go out of doors. But by Wednesday I felt strong enough to venture for a spin in the jeep, wearing sunglasses. At such moments of shame, a spin in the jeep is a great consolation.

It allows me to connect with my nomadic self. I can hug the steering wheel and escape all relational distress or financial pressure, or social shame, and head down the N4 like a Mongol on horseback, watching the earth stretch before me.

Behind the steering wheel I embrace a myth, and am swelled by an unseen hero. I become a homeless hunter, drifting, alone, where neither God nor social decorum can restrain me. I was only going to Athlone, which is not quite Route 66, but I had visions of a fresh bun and a good coffee before driving home through Kilbeggan.

That night I analysed it all with the barman, an overweight Buddha who pulls my pints; a dour guru, with moustache and drooping eyes.

He leaned across the counter, and said: "Your problem started when you threw out the rabbit's ears. You've too many channels. You don't get out often enough."

There was a time when I thought the guttural sound of the Russian tongue was like ice breaking, and about as erotic as the frosty dead eyebrows of Leonid Brezhnev. But two tall women further down the counter were changing my mind. My ears were wagging, and my libido was going into spasms.

The barman confided that he never gets excited, no matter how full the bar is with young Russians in silver anoraks. "But you should come in here more often," he said. "There's more to life than EastEnders."

"I watch other stuff besides soap operas," I said.

"Looka," he said, "yo-yoing up and down to the video shop doesn't constitute a healthy option. You need to get out and meet people."

I said: "I do go out. In fact I'm just back from a spin in the jeep."

"Where did you go?" he asked.

"Athlone," I said.

"That's sad," he said.

I was on the outskirts of Athlone, thinking of where to get a coffee. I was coming to the bridge over the Shannon. I was almost enjoying the sun shining in through the front windscreen, when I saw a garda, in the middle of the road with his hand up, signalling me to halt.

Another fellow was leaning over a tripod in front of the squad car, almost grinning with satisfaction, because they had caught another gobdaw doing 51 in a 50-kilometre zone.

They had caught another mythic hunter, drifting on the surface of the earth, where neither God nor social decorum could restrain him from breaking the speed limit.