Desperate behaviour

Desperate Housewives, or Despera' Oul Ones as we on the northside of Dublin like to call the latest US TV phenomenon, has an awful lot to answer for. All that extramarital pruning with the gardener and after-hours pipe cleaning with the plumber seems to be putting ideas into the normally pure minds of my very attached friends.

This manifests itself in anything from lovesick stares at the much younger next-door neighbour to a full-on come hither directed at the new postman, poor terrified man. But whatever their indiscretions, there is no escaping the fact that the despera' gene, which has lain mostly dormant since my friends shacked up with their men, is making like Mount Etna and sizzling dangerously.

My own despera' side effect is hardly volcanic, but you never know how these things will escalate. I've always had a soft spot for David Beckham, but it has turned into more of a liquefied jelly spot lately. The knowledge, gleaned last year, that he might not be as good a boy as we were led to believe, teamed with his obvious delight at the birth of his third baby, seems to have inflamed my Becks-related passion like never before.

The other day I did something I haven't done since I lived in a bedroom plastered with an eclectic mix of George Michael, Andrew Ridgeley, Paul McCartney and Morrissey. I ripped out a picture of a celebrity - a casually clad, grinning Becks - from a magazine and stuck it on the wall. Sounds harmless enough until you remember what happened after the late Paula Yates stuck a picture of the late Michael Hutchence on her fridge. Let's just say I haven't suggested a trip to Madrid for the good of my health.

But when it comes to being despera', I am a mere bit player in what has become a heaving stadium of salivating seductresses. My friend was enjoying I, Keano with her husband - who himself could quite plausibly do a turn as a devastatingly handsome Despera' handyman - recently when she started to take on worrying Gabrielle traits. For Despera' virgins, Gabrielle is the sexy character who is having an affair with her barely legal gardener under her husband's nose.

Anyway, back to the Olympia Theatre. Halfway through the play my friend noticed an ex, sitting a few rows behind her. Two important things to mention about the ex. He didn't treat her very well when she was seeing him, and he hasn't aged very well.

Neither of these things deterred our despera' heroine. After spotting him during the interval, she spent the rest of the show digging her husband in the ribs and asking him whether the ex was looking in her direction. It might have been okay if she hadn't made it quite clear that far from any ex-related rubbernecking being a source of annoyance, such attention would be desirable. Thinking about it afterwards, she thinks that maybe she can understand why he didn't speak to her for the next two days. "I don't know what came over me," she said. "It's like I forgot he was my husband and started treating him as if he was my friend."

Then there are the despera' oul ones who work in pairs. I may or may not have been caught up in a scenario recently where two women who should know better were wandering around town late at night. Basically, we decided to gatecrash a gathering at a city-centre flat where the average age of the occupants was 23. After drinking the flat dry, we proceeded to flirt loudly and incoherently before all the occupants had retired, for which read escaped, to bed. The evening didn't end quite as we expected. The last thing we remember is sitting outside Grab and Go - basically a massive burger-and-chips vending machine, in the rain, singing Club Tropicana.

Of course the spiritual home for all desperate housewives is not Grab and Go but Dundrum Town Centre. Still, all that posing on the Luas is enough to send you screaming over to the Ilac centre, where nobody cares what you look like or whether your Gucci bag is actually a clever knock-off from Bangkok.

The Ilac, meanwhile, is the spiritual home of despera' oul ones. It's a place where you can roam freely in the kind of stores we thought were the height of fashion before we got all up ourselves and decided it was acceptable to spend hundreds of euro on skin creams.

I'm predicting a comeback for the Ilac when the inevitable Dundrum backlash happens. After all, it has a secret weapon, a facility very few other shopping centres contain. I am of course referring to the Central Library. Despera' oul ones know there is nothing better after a bout of retail therapy than getting your nose into a good self-help book. Men are from Mars, women are from Wisteria Lane. Despera' times indeed.