"I wouldn't buy them beds if I was you," said the man in the shed. Well, not really a shed, though it looked like that from the outside.

More a furniture warehouse set down in the middle of the midlands. "I'll tell you what," he said, "buy them wans, you'd be better off . . ." He pointed towards a wall lined with divan beds, fairly ordinary looking.

I moved away from the fashionable beds with pine ends and slatted base. "Two singles and a double, is it? Ye must be lettin', so . . .?

"Two singles and a double" did not mean fish-and-chips in Portlaoise on a Friday night. It meant the customer likely owned a two-bedroom apartment and was looking to furnish it, with tenants in mind. Which, for reasons I cannot readily explain, usually means putting two single beds in one room and a double bed in the larger room. He read my own mind, as all the best salesmen do and knew his stuff, as the amount of customer cars and vans outside showed.

Still only midday on Sunday. Once- shabby midland towns are currently undergoing a spate of spanking Lego building. New motorways and train lines have put them into Dublin's commuter belt, with the attendant building boom.

Along the flat horizons, Legoland looms in apartments and townhouses, exteriors uniformly painted in mellow yellow. Surely the planners cannot be old enough to remember The Beatles?

"I"d say you was in the letting game. Am I right now? Oh - I knew be the cut of ye," he said amiably, getting back to the practicality of beds for young tenants, weaning me away from first choice.

"They'll be jumping up and down on the new beds, the slats will break. I have landlords in here all the time, complaining about the money they spent; them slatted ones last only a few weeks.

"Especially if you have students, you can forget it altogether . . . The divan bed, on the other hand" - here he put his hefty boot on the surface - "the divan will put up with a lot of wear and tear."

To convince me, he jumped up on the beds and, fair play to him, he was still tapping one stout boot on the divan top as he continued his well-meant advice, the most honest sales pitch heard in a long while.

"Looka here, the divan bed comes apart in two sections, great for getting in and out of different rooms. Because ye can be sure of wan thing. Whatever ye put in, anyway, they'll move it around," he said.

"Oh I know meself, that's how I got into this game," he said, flourishing a hand at the stacks of coffee tables, pictures and prints, sideboards, leather couches and leather-looking 3:2:1s, which he called, lovingly, "set-ees".

"Oh Lawdie Law, don't be talkin' - I could write the book. I'll tell you what, everyone should be a landlord for a while, it'd do them the world of good, am I right now? Oh Lawdie, yis, no need for an education after that . . .

"Now - can I interest you in anything else - how about a few moorals here," he asked, pointing to paintings of the Seine, probably produced on an assembly line in China. They were a good likeness of a classical work, with computer-induced flecks of paint on the surface. A few of them now would add a great bit of tone to the place, say you was lettin' to a couple, like . . .

"I mane the married couples, while they're waitin' for the bungalow to be built. They'll be rentin' in the manetime for a year or so, off the likes of yourself. An' I'll tell you what, they won't be jumpin up and down on them slats, that's only for single folk, like students and famale civil servants and the like," he said, knowingly.

He saw me looking at another replica painting, this time of a Blue Lady. "I wouldn't go for that at all now," he said. "She looks great now, but take my word for it, the students will be using her as a dart-board in a few weeks an' callin' her the Spotted Lady . . .

"How about this wan?" he asked, showing a 19th century Parisian café scene. "The Garda students love that wan, romantic livin' in France an' all that, God love the poor hoors . . . they'll be out soon in the world and have them notions knocked out of them."

He did me good, listening to him. The heart of the country is sound, I thought. It was the last burst of summer, outside a shed in the midlands.

I bought three beds, a coffee table and passed on the Blue Lady.