I found this whilst looking on the web for stories about husbands who may have been slapped by a mackerel.

SHORE WOMAN

Man to the hills, woman to the shore. (Irish proverb)

I have crossed the dunes with their whistling bent
Where dry loose sand was riddling round the air
And I’m walking the firm margin. White pocks
Of cockle, blanched roofs of clam and oyster
Hoard the moonlight, woven and unwoven
Off the bay. A pale sud at the far rocks
Comes and goes.

Out there he put me through it.
Under the boards the mackerel slapped to death
Yet we still took them in at every cast,
Stiff flails of cold convulsed with their first breath.
My line plumbed certainly the undertow,
Loaded against me once I went to draw
And flashed and fattened up towards the light.
He was all business in the stern. I called:
“This is so easy that it’s hardly right,”
But he unhooked and coped with frantic fish
Without speaking. Then suddenly it lulled,
We’d crossed where they were running, the line rose
Like a let-down and I was conscious
How far we’d drifted out beyond the head.
“Count them up at your end”, was all he said
Before I saw the porpoises’ thick backs
Cartwheeling like the flywheels of the tide,
Soapy and shining. To have seen a hill
Splitting the water could not have numbed me
More than the close irruption of that school,
Tight viscous muscle, hooped from tail to snout,
Each one revealed complete as it bowled out
And under.

They will attack a boat.
I knew it and I asked John to put in
But he would not, declared it was a yarn
My people had been fooled by far too long
And he would prove it now and settle it.
Maybe he shrank when those thick slimy backs
Propelled towards us: I lay and screamed
Under splashed brine in an open rocking boat
Feeling each dunt and slither through the timber,
Sick at their huge pleasures in the water.

I sometimes walk this strand for thanksgiving
Or maybe it’s to get away from him
Skittering his spit across the stove. Here
Is the taste of safety, the shelving sand
Harbours no worse than razor shell or crab –
Though my father recalls carcasses of whales
Collapsed and gasping, right up to the dunes.
But to-night such moving, sinewed life patrols
The blacker fathoms out beyond the head.
Astray upon a detritus of shells,
Between parched dunes and salivating wave
I claim rights on this fallow avenue,
A membrane between moonlight and my shadow.

(From Wintering Out, 1972)

I have mentioned that I brought back with me from Spain the remnants of the leg of ham we had out there. Today I have been turning it into good heart attack material. That’s pork scratching to the rest of you.

This is a simple process that entails putting the pieces of leg and the bits of fat in a tray and putting that in a low oven. The fat should render away so you are left with the small nuggets of meat, that escaped the sharp knife in spain, and crisped up curls of skin.

It has been in the oven for an hour or so now and the house is filling with the smell of slowly roasted pork fat. I have been picking at the small morsels of dark red meat. They pull easily away from the bone and skin now that the fat is melting away. The pieces of skin still feel quite soft but I think they will crisp up once they are out of the oven and have cooled down.

At this rate I will be lucky to make my half century later this year!

There was another Farmer’s Market today in New Ferry and for the first time in about two years I didn’t buy a free range chicken for Sunday lunch. I felt guilty about it and had to keep away from the stall in case I caught the eye of the man behind it and I felt obliged to buy one.

Instead of chicken we, or at least two of us, are going to have a smallish piece of roast beef for lunch. And this afternoon I managed to find in the garden a rather thin and gnarled piece of horseradish root to have with it.

I managed to resist the temptation to buy a great rib of beef which might have been a bit too much for just two greedy mouths. I also resisted the temptation to buy myself an ox heart to roast. It was only £2.00 and would keep me in sandwiches for the next two weeks but I was almost spent out by the time I saw it.

I did buy some bread sticks, a large breast of lamb, various sausage rolls and tarts (for lunch), cheese and two pheasants. I only needed the one pheasant but at £6.00 each and two for £8.00 it seemed silly not to take the second one as well. It is in the freezer.

I am having the pheasant this evening. It has been browned in butter and onions, a chopped quince has been added together with a half bottle of cider. It is bubbling away in the oven. I will have it with a couple of sliced fried potatoes and some good red wine.

There was another two weeks that went by before the feck Patrick Martin was sat in here again on a Saturday morning. The curtains had only just opened and it wasn’t past midday but he sat here on one of those tall stools and put his arms on the bar.

“Mary. Mary, can I have a pint now and be quick with it. I have no time today to let it rest and Mary can I have a follow up quick to help it go down.’

Mary filled the pint glass as she always does and she didn’t give it any hurry. As she let it rest on its tray she filled a small glass with Powers and put it front of him. He drank at it quickly.

‘I’ll have another one Mary.’

One of the other men stood at the bar was about to say something but he paused when he saw Patrick’s face. He was clean shaven and on each of his cheeks could be seen the distinct mark of a mackerel, its head and eye and half opened mouth etched a faint pink on his skin.

‘You can see it can’t you. How the feck now did I get marked with a mackerel like this. I am here last night and I have a few pints, I go home and I go to bed and I stand in front of my mirror and as I shave my feckin’ beard off this morning these feckin’ fish appear on my cheeks. And I come downstairs after that and she’s cooking the feckin’ things for my breakfast. I told her, give them to the cat, I’m not eating them today. What the feck did I do to a mackerel to have them on my cheeks like this.’

“You had for breakfast didn’t you?’ the man said.

‘Every feckin’ man has mackerel for breakfast but that doesn’t mean he starts his day with the feckin’ things on his cheeks. If I wanted a tattoo there’s a place in Bantry that does it but I don’t want a feckin’ tattoo and I don’t want a mackerel on my face.’

‘Were they there yesterday?’ the man asked.

‘How the feck should I know if they were there yesterday. Yesterday I had a beard. I shaved the thing off this morning and now I have these on my cheeks.’

Mary put the pint in front of him and he drank at it greedily almost half the glass gone before he put it back on the bar.

‘Have you thought about not shaving?’

‘No I have not thought about and do you want to know why. I don’t want a beard not all the time. I want to be able to shave on a Saturday morning and not have a fishes eye looking back at me in the mirror.’

‘Did Siobhan say anything?’

‘Siobhan isn’t talking to me and on the whole I am happier with that. the woman is nothing but tongue when she does talk. All she does is give me a plateful of fish and expect me to eat it looking like this. She does not say a word.’

The man doesn’t say anything and he lets Patrick Martin finish his pint. But the man has in his mind the bucket of mackerel he saw Siobhan Martin pick up from the pier that Friday afternoon and her determined walk as she took it back home.