Displaced in MullingarHaving failed in his efforts to woo a beautiful woman Michael Hardinglearns some lessons from the local Lotharios

Last Saturday I was in the US ambassador's residence for a celebration of all that is great and wonderful about American democracy. We began with finger food, champagne, Sharon Shannon, three tenors and a comedian.

The big white marquee was full of television people; a famous pop singer, a retired taoiseach and a few hundred lesser mortals, who seemed pleased enough to be swanking around on the lawns, with unlimited supplies of hooch and mini pizzas.

The ambassador said a few words: nothing too bombastic; nothing about the greatness of the US, or anything like that. And I suppose considering the times we live in, an understated approach to American achievements was a good move.

It ended with a spectacular show of fireworks, accompanied by an arrangement of heroic American folk tunes, and finally, as the gushing crowd rushed to the garden, a final fanfare of explosives lit the sky, and the orchestral sounds of Beethoven burst from giant speakers under the oak trees.

I felt flushed with possibilities. I felt imbued with that valiant quality which makes men presume that seducing beautiful women, or conquering foreign nations, is a simple matter.

And I was beside a very beautiful woman, wondering what to do next. So I made a witty remark. I said the noisy sky looked remarkably similar to Baghdad during the first days of the American invasion. She didn't find it even slightly amusing.

The following evening I dined with two young blades in Mullingar. I asked one of them how to woo a woman. He took one look at me and said, "The eyebrows!" I said I didn't realise that a woman's eyebrows were so important. I thought perhaps her eyes might be the key, or some other body part.

"What am I supposed to do to her eyebrows?" "Not hers," he replied, staring at my forehead. "Your eyebrows, is the problem." The eyebrows, if they are too thick, become a barrier, he explained, a bushy thing that women cannot penetrate.

"It's like looking under a hedge," the other one said. "You must pluck them!"

Clearly I have lived too long in Leitrim, under the hedge, without benefiting from the Kama Sutras of Westmeath. Later in the evening we were joined by three women, and the blade of glory went to the piano, and bent his head over the keyboard, and crooned such sad lyrics that all the women were entirely besotted by him.

"There's more to courtship than plucked eyebrows," I whispered to the other blade, who was hardly more than a cipher, as the evening moved from one song to the next.

Shakespeare said music was the food of love, and to be sure, the Mullingar male is a fine thing to behold, in full-throated ease, as he warbles the odd aria.

Westmeath is a rich land, with plenty to warble about. But it is also a land of broken boys, and damaged patriarchal psyches.

The "Westmeath Bachelor" was once caricatured as a frisky fiftysomething, with dyed hair, who spent his days minding mammy, and his nights at the back of a ballroom. That's all changed; nowadays the cool dude drives a Mercedes, and holidays on the Mediterranean.

And unlike those who suck cocaine up their nostrils with inverted rage, because the New Ireland has turned them into goofy eunuchs, the "Westmeath Bachelor" warbles from the top of his greasy pole, with bullish ease.

He sings from the heart, about the burdens of manhood, without the slightest irony, and he finds poetry in sentimental remembrance. His music is simple, and his body is of such firm stuff, that when he dances, all he can do is follow the one, two, three, of old waltzes played slow.

He's a big boy, with beef to the heels, adored by women, at ease with Poland, and not precious about eyebrows, when it comes to a lady's pleasure.

On the lush green lawns where stallions whinny, I wine and dine with a giant. A man more myth than mortal. A small god in the provincial world of shopkeepers, solicitors, auctioneers, and friends of the State.

If hubris was a steroid then the "Westmeath Bachelor" would bestride the midlands like a colossus, his fleshy rump so endowed with lard, that half of Killucan might play handball up against one flank of his arse.

He doesn't wear cowboy hats on the streets of Mullingar, but his style is Yankee Doodle, and he would certainly have felt at home in the white marquee, on the US ambassador's lawn.