Tom Cronin shifted uneasily on his chair at the news that the mackerel he had enjoyed for his breakfast the last two days and the fish that were in the bag under where he was sitting had been caught on hooks tainted with the smell of two week old horse shit. He thought on his wife who had enjoyed the fish as well. She had even congratulated him on getting the man out to catch them this time of year. He knew he was caught between letting her know and her finding out elsewhere.

The men were quiet behind him so he said it first, ‘Bill was it the smell of the shit you had on the hooks or did you snag some of the brown stuff there as well?’

At that the men behind him started to murmur.

Clancy O’Connor, who had been in the pub since lunchtime, rested his right elbow on the table in front of of him and lifted a finger as if to clear the air before he spoke and then thought better of it his mouth hanging open. He remembered he’d fed yesterday’s fish to the dog. He’d do the same thing tomorrow. So he put his arm down and sat back to listen.

‘Patrick O’Mohaney kept his hooks with the hens he had in his garage. He had them buried under a good thick layer of straw and he let them take on the smell that way and if a hen caught its arse on a hook it could always shake itself free and a few free feathers only added to the smell. Caught plenty that way he said.’

‘Feck Bill will you explain it again? How was it you got the smell on the hooks. Did you rub some of it on there with your fingers? There’s no better way of getting a smell into a thing but rubbing it. But feck Bill you wouldn’t want to be rubbing too much with a bucket of horse shit. You might be out there catching mackerel but you’ll catch feck all in here apart from a cold shoulder.’

Clancy had something to say now and he put his elbow back on the table and lifted his finger, ‘Bill, now I say now, Bill if you’re out there catching fish with horse shit then you need to introduce some method into the process. Did you think of taking a bucket of the stuff out there with you and spreading a few handfuls on the water. I say now Bill, Bill did you not think to hang your arse over the side of the boat and see how the mackerel took a bite at that?’

The men laughed at that and Clancy put down his finger.

‘The only fish that will eat any old shit is a grey mullet and they have soft lips so they don’t have to taste the stuff and you don’t have to catch them. Their lips are like a piece of jelly if they take a bite on a hook and they just seems to slide of it. Live in shit and eat shit does a grey mullet. But if you get one out of the water then the eating of it is as good as any fish.’

Clancy was laughing now, the sound coming through his teeth, holding up his finger again.

‘Bill,’ he said. ‘Bill, if you have your arse over the side of the boat you could try blowing bubbles at the same time and see if they like that.’

He tapped his glass, ‘Bill if you drink plenty of this stuff and let it rest for a while then it will smell well enough. And any man here who has not lain in bed in the morning and put his head under covers after letting go some air that man is a liar. This stuff’ll build up a good fug down there and the fish’ll like that .’

His voice dropped a touch as if to let on a secret. ‘You’ve all seem the ladies who swim in the afternoon and take themselves out to the island. Do you think they put on those black rubber suits to keep themselves warm. Feck. It is to keep in the bubbles of air. If that bit of air got out they’d have mackerel nibbling their arses to the island and back.’

Their initial diet includes a high proportion of faecal pellets from copepods (small planktonic crustaceans, commonly known as ‘feed’).                                                    Stephen J. Lockwood The Mackerel   

The man with a black beard had his hands flat on the wooden bar fingers splayed out. They were big heavy hands with thick knuckles. He was waiting for his pint to be poured.

The men had helped themselves to the mackerel from the silver bucket. Four of them sat with a plastic bag under their stool holding the fish to be taken home that evening, filleted  and put in the fridge to be had with bacon the following morning. They would all cook the bacon first in a pan and then fry off the fillets quickly in the bacon grease and eat it with brown bread and butter.

It had been raining now for three days and each day the man had gone out and come back with a bucket of mackerel. The men would keep taking the mackerel home while he kept catching them. They were a rare treat in the bare days of February. These were good sized fish as well each of them a foot long.

The man walked straight up to the pub from the pier. He left it until mid-afternoon before going out. He took the boat out further into the bay where the water was deep and the roiling swell from the Atlantic came straight in lifting the boat and setting it down. An hour was enough time for him to catch the fish and he would be back as the grey light started to fade and it would be getting on dark when he turned off the engine and tied up his boat.

He had put the bucket down on the concrete floor and let the men take their fish before turning to the bar to take his first pint. His hair and beard was slick with rain and he was still breathing hard with the work he had put in over the afternoon.

The men were quiet. After the talk from the change in the weather there was an awkwardness about them brought on by the man’s insistence on going out to catch his fish despite the rain and the weather. They each waited for one of them to ask the question.

Mary put a pint glass in front of the man and he lifted his hands from the bar rubbing his fingers together and wiping at his mouth before taking up the glass and drinking at the black liquid. The glass was cool and there were beads of condensation. He rubbed his fingers again and turned to speak to the men.

‘There are fish out there but you have to go find them and when you find them you have to have them bite at the hook. Get it right and there’s no need for feathers or anything bright to catch their eye. The fish at this time of year are not looking to fatten themselves up. They still have their work to do. But they will have a bite at something they like the smell of.’

‘There are a few weeks when a mackerel is nothing but the size of my nail when its only food is the waste that is left behind by the other fish, the squid and flotsam that are no bigger than they are and move in the water alongside them. So they eat on that shit until they are big enough to start biting at those other fish and after that they will eat at anything that’s the right size and moves through the water. But they’ll keep a taste for that matter and if you put something in the water that has a smell that can take them back to it they will take a bite at it.’

‘So before I go out I will give the hooks a rub down with some old horse manure. Now I have tried others but they don’t work so well. Fresh and its no good and cow shit and pig shit do nothing. But leave some horse shit in a bucket for a week and then pull your bare hooks through it you’ll come up roses with the fish.’

‘A good mackerel’s a rare pleasure this time of year so boys you enjoy them whilst I can catch them.’

The man took his pint then in his hand and he finished off the glass a smile on his face as he did so.

Every other feature on the Today Programme this morning seemed to be on the death of Lou Reed. They even got in Herbie Flowers to talk about the bass playing he did on Walk on the Wild Side. There was a lot of discussion around his ‘classic’ songs such as Perfect Day and Walk on the Wild Side and what a great influence he was and that was about it. We just got a brief glimpse of why he mattered when they played a few seconds of Black Angel’s Death Song from the first Velvet Underground album and we got some of the noise and contrariness that underpinned his music.

Then talking to Dad this evening he wasn’t sure he knew who Lou Reed was so I tried to explain it was more about his influence as opposed to the number of records he sold and how they said about the first Velvet Underground album that it didn’t sell many copies but everyone who bought a copy went off to form a band. Except me of course!  Why didn’t I form a band? I even have two copies of the record.

The second copy came as part of a 5 album box set that I bought in my last few weeks at university when I had no money but was able to find the credit to make the £20.00 to pay for it. The five albums were made up of the first three albums and two albums of offcuts and unreleased tracks. I bought it on the back of a South Bank Show documentary a copy of which I still have on video somewhere. I will need to dig it out and show the kids. Maybe they will then go off and form bands.

A large part of the attraction was the noise. There is a bit near the beginning of European Son that sound like it might be an electric guitar being dragged backwards across a floor with all the knobs on loud. I like that kind of thing. I can remember trying to explain that to friends twenty five years ago and all they wanted to do was listen to Billy Joel.

A lot of it goes back to REM and watching them in the mid-1980’s do covers of Femme Fatale and Pale Blue Eyes. I could blame REM for a lot of things like that.

I never saw him in concert but I have seen John Cale a couple of times. Once in the Royal Festival Hall in London and second time in the Phil here in Liverpool. There are times I prefer John Cale.