Twink has just hotfooted it straight from rehearsals for Menopause: The Musical, her risque musical romp with Linda Martin at the Tivoli Theatre. "People will pee in their seats laughing when we open," the star of the show promises. Twink almost does the same herself, however, when I ask her has she fallen in love again since breaking up with David Agnew.

"Certainly not!" she roars with laughter. "Certainly not!"

When I ask Twink to explain her certainty about romantic love, she regards me sternly from under her Bambi eyelashes: "Because! Because I absolutely couldn't be bothered," she says brusquely. "I have absolutely no intention. To fall in love, you'd have to open your heart. You'd have to be looking at people potentially." She rolls her eyes at the word, potentially, rolling the syllables.

"I invested so much time and devotion into that (cue more theatrical rolling of the eyes) relationship -- the very idea of investing even a tenth of it would wear me to the bone. Maybe I wasn't ever suitable for marriage. I am such an only child. I am such a soloist."

Would you not like the attention of a male admirer?

"For what?"

To be brought out to dinner.

"I had that for a year with somebody," she says not naming him, "and I got so bored. Because I was having to make conversations. For what? I can afford to buy my own dinner. I don't like going out. I go out for a living."

Her idea of a great night is, she says, to sit in at home in Rathfarnham with her kids and her dogs and her cats. Her idea of heaven is to go down the river for a couple of hours with all her dogs -- Jilly, who is sleeping soundly in Twink's handbag on the floor, among them. "So why would I want a man?"

Sex.

"I don't feel the need for it," she replies. "I find some guys attractive, but the idea of having to go back to feeling when they ring you that you have to go out on Thursday for dinner. I just couldn't be bothered. I love my own time, my own space, my own company and being my own boss. I am not interested in having a new man at my age."

These are themes that will doubtless be explored at great length in Menopause: The Musical. "There is a great laugh at ourselves in this. But I can read the reviews already. As if we give a toss. The reviews didn't affect Dirty Dusting," she says of her last stage offering.

"They are going to come trying to review Uncle Vanya. Basically, for a reviewer, Menopause is a load of tosh."

But women of a certain age will come to see it in their droves, she says, and for them it will be pure entertainment.

"It is not a great night's philosophy of how to cope with the menopause," she adds. "It is a laugh at oneself. And there are lots of great lines in Menopause," she adds, quoting: "It doesn't matter what I bite -- it still looks like cellulite." There'll also be, she promises, plenty of great lines about oestrogen, Prozac, Valium, big knickers, and hormone replacement therapy.

Twink firmly believes, as well she might, in the male menopause too. This manifests itself in the men, she says, "getting grumpy and fretting about hair loss and weight gain, and looking for a younger woman to prove to themselves that their mickeys still work. I definitely think it is a proving thing. The men go out proving and the women sit at home crying," she laughs, before pausing for thought.

"It is pretty balanced, isn't it?" she muses, softly. "No wonder marriages break up."

When she sweeps, spectacularly, into the Noto cafe on Thomas Street at the appointed time last weekend, Twink looks like an elegant Boadicea in a sharp Louise Kennedy suit and runners. To signify, perhaps, that Twink is always on the go. I remark on how driven she is.

"I'm not driven. Are you nuts?" she shrieks with laughter. "You should know me by now. I'd like to walk my dogs and do bugger all else. I'd like to retire."

Retirement? You? I don't believe it for a second.

"Trust me," she smiles, "nothing would please me better. I can't stand this stupid business. If I had it all over again, I would never darken the door of a theatre. The older I get the more I realise that this was a waste of my life," she says with a forlorn melodrama that is a delight to watch up close on a cold, autumnal evening.

"I am not a regretful person. I do believe that things happen for a reason. I am philosophical enough to say that the plan was meant to be and what happened happened. And nothing on the planet could have changed that."

And if Twink could have changed that, she says she would have continued doing the only thing she ever had a total focus on in life -- "medicine. I would have continued a career in medicine, possibly psychiatry or certainly neuro-science of some sort. I am fascinated with the workings of the human mind and how it goes wrong."

Of course, Twink has endured enough psychological pain over the years to keep neuro-scientists and psychiatrists alike quite busy. She's a woman who's been through the wars over the years: with the Gaiety Theatre, with bankruptcy, with her solicitor Elio Malocco, with her husband. She endured her husband's very public infidelity -- an affair with clarinet player Ruth Hickey with whom David now has a child -- yet she managed to keep her dignity.

She is like a new woman who has remade her own life through necessity.

The only heavy baggage Twink is carrying today is the aforesaid Jilly, her mini Yorkshire Terrier, who is secretly stashed in her handbag. "They turn a blind eye to Jilly," she says, ordering a black coffee, and planting a big wet smacker on my face. I had feared it was going to be a Dracula-like bite on my jugular.

Twink hasn't spoken to me for seven years since the last interview we did, during which she talked about her then husband David Agnew's betrayal of her with other women: a "slapper dotcom" and a "gold-digger digging in a place that has no gold" were two descriptions she used of the women her husband cheated on her with. (She regretted the interview and after it was published Twink angrily told me she and David read the interview on the bed together and wept.)

She told me at the time that their 20-year marriage was lacking for "a lot of years" because she knew "there was subterfuge going on that I couldn't quite place".

You mean other women, I asked her at the time.

"Yes. He didn't like himself, because he was doing it and lying to me. He was in a I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For period of his life. I offered him out. I opened the door and said: 'There's the door. I wouldn't want anyone staying with me or living with me that feels they have to be here,'" she told me in 2000.

Agnew's betrayal was a heavy burden to bear. And inevitably that burden became too heavy in 2006 when her husband had a child with the woman -- 30 years Twink's junior -- he had publicly left her for in 2005 . Hearing this news compounded the years of suffering, unhappiness and pain that David had brought to Twink and, by extension, their two young daughters, Chloe, 18, and Naomi, 14.

AND she snapped. What woman wouldn't have? The phone call to David Agnew's answering machine that followed ranks up there with the greatest, most passionate performances of Twink's career. "Thank you, I tend to try and give a great performance always," she laughs now, looking back on Zip Up Your Mickey.

The F word is used five times, bastard six, dickhead three, middle-aged and prick twice; fat, idiot, and stupid once apiece. Zip Up Yer Mickey, as it was known, soon became legendary in Ireland and beyond once it appeared on the website YouTube. The choicer excerpts included: "Put your mickey back in your trousers. Zip up your mickey. If I was near you I'd slap the f****** face off you."

I ask the creator of these lines why she didn't put it to music and release it as a single and make a fortune (or even copyright the phrase: "How dumb was I? They even used it in a play in the West End, Dick Zippington"). Twinks says she even bought some Zip Up Your Mickey merchandising at the time. She opened the package she had ordered and the G-strings, condoms, calendars, tea towels and aprons -- all with the infamous four words emblazoned boldly on them -- tumbled out onto the kitchen floor. "I am falling around the kitchen laughing and the girls are disgusted," Twink recalls. "They are going: 'That's not at all funny, Mum.' And the more they didn't laugh the more I went into convulsions."

Despite laughing about the merchandise, the marriage break-up can't have been easy to deal with.

"I had to keep my chin up in public. I am not a whinger. And also I don't think it is fair when you are in the public eye to whine, because everybody has their own problems. I think you just need to shut up and whinge at home."

It must have been horrendous for you to open newspapers and see pictures of David walking down the street with Ruth and their new baby.

"In the beginning it hurt. But you are not going to get a headline out of this: 'Twink cried with pain.' I am not one of those grief-stricken women."

Twink, I am just saying that for any woman to see the man she has been with for over 30 years walk down the street with a young woman must have been painful on lots of different levels.

"Well," she says, slowly, "it wasn't the first time. So I kind of got used to it by then.

"At this stage of my life, do you honestly think I could give a fat rat's pertudy about her or what she does or thinks or cares or says about me? Do you? Do you honestly think you would lose a night's sleep over it? Do I look like that?"

She adds that her main hurt was for Chloe and Naomi. "And that any woman could be two years with a married man knowing he had children -- and knowing the hurt and pain this was going to cause? Well, she has a child of her own now. And if it happens on her some day she'll know what it feels like."

Twink adds that David has, in her opinion, a "slightly better" relationship with Chloe and Naomi now: "which is good". It is one which Twink says she has fostered "quietly", because she believes that children need a father in their lives.

"And I think it was a shame for us breaking up, the children were so ... " she says, trailing off mid-sentence.

I ask Twink how long it took her to heal the pain, and she recalls the day last year she was driving through Rathmines to rehearsals for You're a Star. She was going over Portobello Bridge when it dawned on her that it had been three or four days and she hadn't even thought of David Agnew. "That kind of scared me and at the same time delighted me."

That was, she says, a turning point of realising that there are more important things in her life. "You don't need to be Einstein to reckon that takes a bit of getting used to," she says. "It is not like a weekend fling that ends and you are a bit crushed. It is 30 years of your life."

Apart from the two lovely children they produced, were those 30 years with David a waste of your life?

"I would never like to think of it in those terms. No. Because there were some wonderful times."

Do you hate him?

"No, I'm not a hateful person. I know people who have a lot of hatred in them for this person and that person but I think it gives you cancer. No, I don't do hate very well."

There is a long pause. She seems to have something else she wants to say before she picks up her handbag and takes Jilly home.

"There is an enormously large place in my heart for David," one of our national treasures began. "Always has been, always will be. It has been knocked sideways and punched around over the years with various affairs and things. It is that old story of 'I'll always love you -- I'm not sure how much I like you.' But there will be a huge part of me that will always love David.

"I am a great believer that time heals all things. And I'd like to think that in time the wound will heal and we will go back to being the good friends we always were. That would be a very nice thought for the future."

Peeking out of her owner's handbag, Jilly seems to approve of the sentiment.

'Menopause: The Musical', runs from Oct 18 to Nov 10 at the Tivoli Theatre, Francis Street, Dublin 1. Box office: (01) 454 4472. www.tivoli.ie