This is not my story, but it could be yours if you stay out of the country long enough for the bulldozers and money men to change the familiar pictures you kept in your head while you were away.

This is "her" story and I will tell it the way she felt it, as she slumped down in the back of the taxi from the airport.

She had been away for about a year, letting the apartment which had been her home in south Dublin. During her time away she kept in touch, not only with friends, but with the country's prosperity.

She is of a generation for whom the internet is a reflex, a few taps on the keyboard bought the online version of this venerable newspaper. You might think, therefore, she should have been more prepared, especially as Property is available, online.

As well, being of a gossipy nature, she liked to know the "inside story" and prided herself on keeping up by phone with the milestones of her friends lives - hatch, match, divorce, rematch. She is not yet of an age when despatch means funerals. And yet, all of that, or none of that, seems to have prepared her as the taxi drove out of the airport and skirted the city. She did not recognise the terrain as she approached what had been her apartment block. She told the driver he was going the wrong way.

She was so insistent, that he pulled off the motorway slip road (new to her) and rang his control to establish he was on the right route. Chastened for appearing to suggest he was "taking the long way around", she listened as he - wishing to make peace - assured her he often got lost, such was the pace of change in the built environment.

As for motorways, he said, forget it, until they put proper signs on them. The other night, heading for Dundrum, he overshot and found himself on the M50 turn-off at Tallaght and was thankful he had not gone all the way back to the airport. Could easily have happened, he said, except his low opinion of planners saved him and his experience told him he had overshot. As for novice drivers, it must be a nightmare. Now miss, where was it you wanted? Are we still going to the same place?

By the time the taxi drew up outside the apartment block, she was, she told me, in a mood to go straight back to the airport. Was it for this she had left Manhattan and the buzz of New York? Well no, not actually, her love life had not worked out and she needed home comforts, in well, home, actually. Old friends, as opposed to new ones. Who knows, lady luck might smile on her again, romantically speaking.

While away, she had imagined her old apartment with more creeper on the walls and a little shabbier. But she had not imagined herself stumbling across a massive building site, dragging her expensive suitcases over rocky ground.

There was a "safety barrier" around the complex, to stop bulldozers knocking chunks off corners. She moved by heavy-machinery and vehicle carriers she was more used to seeing in TV coverage from Iraq.

The driver had to stop the far side of a minor earth mountain.

And though he offered to help with the cases, she was in such a fury she refused and set off across the building site, only to be shouted at by a yellow jacket, to get out of the way of a open truck, backing up with loaded gravel. By the time she put the key in the lock of her old apartment, she was frazzled and in need of a drink.

And fair enough, her departing tenant had left a full bottle with a note as a thank you for a year's cheap rent. She knocked back a glass and looked out the window - and wept. What should had been her view of the sea was now a flyover motorway bridge, with just a glimpse of blue between the concrete support columns. On the south-facing balcony, where she had seen herself reclining in the evening, looking out over the Wicklow hills, a view timeless enough to help mend a broken heart, was - a business park. Fully fledged in all its Legoland squares of glass, concrete and steel, it seemed to march up the hills as if there never were trees and birds and bushes.

"Why did nobody tell me?", she wailed when we met for a catch-up lunch. She showed the apartment sales brochure from years ago, with its enticing coastal views from the kitchen and a sweep of Wicklow hills from the bedroom.

Nice pictures, full marks to the brochure designer.

As I say, this is her story and not mine. But it could be yours, too, if you live outside the country long enough and do not update in your imagination the pictures you last saw on leaving.