DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:A FRIEND OF MINE has just moved into a bungalow, which is not quite finished, writes Michael Harding

The kitchen is as large as a small dancehall, but it is still very bare. There are no curtains. Not many furnishings. A cooker and fridge have been installed. The fireplace is a gaping hole in the wall, lined with new firebricks.But he lit a fire anyway, on Sunday night, and friends assembled to warm the building.

Half a dozen people sat around on soft chairs and hard chairs and upside down laundry baskets.

I couldn't take my eyes off a fiery woman from Georgia, with auburn hair. She sat on the sofa, chatting in Russian with two women from Lithuania. And there was a young Italian couple in the shadows at the patio doors, like escapees from an adventurous production of Romeo and Juliet.

I hung out with three Irish men; we huddled around the fire and watched the flames.

Then the room began to fill with smoke, so suddenly that the women vanished into a fog and the lady from Georgia - whose grandfather was a priest and had spent years in a Siberian labour camp - jumped up and commanded everyone to save the house before it burned down.

Logs were dragged out the door on shovels and in buckets. The patio smouldered. The wind took millions of sparks into the night, but then someone sniffed around the kitchen and declared that it wasn't smoke at all; it was only steam from the firebricks.

We all returned and the fire was re-kindled and the men took up their positions once again, hugging the flames.

We talked about fires and about a man who lived in the locality many years ago and owned a Stradivarius, and played it well.

But one winter, the ESB cut off his electricity supply because he was not in the habit of paying bills.

Since he had forgotten how to walk about in the dark, he went up the stairs every night with an ember of burning turf stuck on the poker, to light his way to the bedroom where there was another fire grate.

That lasted a few weeks until the house went on fire and he was burned to death; his press of fiddles and his precious Stradivarius reduced to a heap of cinders.

The company divided into two groups: men at the fire and women at the other end of the room, near the cooker, where they kept a check on how the dinner was coming along.

A young man spoke of an uncle who played the fiddle, but was married to a woman who didn't like the sound of it. One night, having waited until he had hung his fiddle on the wall and gone to bed, she then took all of his music notes and threw them into the fire. He never played again.

The young man said that, when he was a child, he would visit this uncle - then a feeble old widower - and he said the old man would often doze in his chair and stare vacantly into the empty grate.

I recalled that, when I was at secondary school, I studied in the college study hall until 9pm each evening and cycled home by Loreto woods and the golf club lane, where barrel-topped wagons were often parked in winter-time.

I would bid goodnight to the boys and girls who stood around the fire that warmed the darkness of my long road home as they gazed back at me like saints in a Caravaggio painting.

And then one of the women declared that the duck was ready and we went to the table, and ate by candlelight. Huge flames were leaping in the grate, because we had decided that only a fire with a mighty heart would dry the damp bricks.

The windows were left open - a madness which provoked the Lithuanians to raid the bedrooms and put on dressing gowns.

We warmed ourselves with bottles of wine and slices of succulent duck, but the language barrier didn't allow for much nuanced conversation regarding American presidents, the credit crunch, or the death of the Peedees on the floor of the Park Hotel.

The woman from Georgia spoke Russian with enormous passion, but I hadn't a clue what she was talking about, so I abandoned any efforts at understanding her and just danced all night.