Patrick Cotter grunted and shifted from his position on the grass and his shirt fell from his face. He settled down again but the skin on his upper arms, which had been a clear white an hour before, was now mottled red and his face was in the full glare of the sun.

‘Feck Patrick if you stay there much longer you’ll look as good as boiled lobster’ the man said.

‘Get yourself up and put your shirt back on and have a drink to cool yourself down.’

Patrick Cotter stirred himself from where he was lying on the grass and turned over pushing himself as he went with his elbows. He looked up to where we were standing.

‘Will you feck off and get me a pint and then let me go back to sleep.’

‘I’ll buy you a pint if you tell me what you were dreaming of down there. Was it a nightmare, and you being pulled from the sea and then taken back to a kitchen and dropped in a pan of water because you are red enough now and then you wake up on someone’s plate all covered in butter.’

‘Feck, will you get me that pint, it is too hot to be sat here with nothing to drink.’

‘Tell me your dreams Patrick Cotter and I’ll buy a bottle.’

He turned again on the grass and sat up so he had his back to us and he could look out over the sea. He put his shirt back on, his arms beating the air as he went, and breathed deeply.

‘I’ll not need a bottle’ he said.

We stood quiet and out on the water we could see that the boat which had been fishing off Owen Island was coming in.

‘Who is that out there coming in. He had some mackerel out there. He’s got them in a metal bucket and some of them are kicking their tales still. That’s lonely tattoo to make out in a bucket. ‘

‘Have you not heard the sound of mackerel as they come out of the water? A man can be out there pulling his line in and all he will hear are a few gulls coughing in the air above him and the slap of water against the side of his boat. But down there in the water there is a whole rush of noise as the hook is pulled up against their lip and a fish is caught short as the rest of them swim on ahead.’

He rubbed the back of his hand against his mouth and he looked dissappointed.

‘You’ve not heard them have you?’

‘Did it not occur that a mackerel might make a sound as it is caught and there might be some indignation in that.’

‘Will you imagine for a moment if some great feck put an axe in the side of your face and then pulled you up short through the very air that you breathe and then takes a piece of sharp wood to the back of your head. If you were lucky there’d be no time to make a sound.’

‘It’s the sound in the water they make. Most men they are only in there for such a short time they don’t give themselves a chance to listen. But if you’re in a boat out there and there is not too much going on put your head over the side and into the sea for a while and tell me what you can hear.’

‘Once your head is in the water you will need to shake the air out of your ears. But once you have done that keep still and listen. It will be quiet for a while but then you will hear it deep down below like a great rush of wind through trees thick with leaves. Down there it is so dark there is nothing to see but there could be a million fish moving by so solid in the water they could stop you from sinking.’

‘You want to know about my dreams. Well I dream on the noise that those fish make as they move through the water. Now will you feck off into the pub and get me a pint.’

The man with the black beard looked at my empty glass and nodded his head before walking back to the open door of the pub.

Patrick Cotter watched as the blue boat pulled up the pier. The man in the boat tied it up and then lifted out a metal bucket. We could hear the noise that it made as he dropped it on the concrete of the pier. The man pulled himself up out of the boat and standing on the pier picked up the bucket and walked down the pier, onto the road and then left up the hill to the pub.

‘Put your slow heart to one side for a day and take a boat out for a while to go fishing.’

It was the first bright day of summer, a few days into June, and I was stood by the wall in Arundel’s garden at the top with the grass leading down the steep slope to the rocks and the sea. The tables and chairs were empty but Patrick Cutter was asleep on the grass. He had taken his shirt off to cover his face from the sun. He had kept his vest on and the white skin between where his shirt had been and the vest finished was turning red in the sun.

I had a pint in my hand and next to me the man with a black beard was drinking cider on ice.

‘It helps to cut off some of the heat from the sun’ he had said.

It was late afternoon and the tide was coming in and the sea was almost coming over the small group of rocks to the right of Owen Island. There was no wind and sun shone brightly off from the water so that we had to squint as we looked out. There were three boats that had gone off from the pier an hour or so earlier.  Two of them had continued out into the bay and were now out of sight but one of them had kept close moving slowly across the gap between the point where Luke kept his boat and Owen Island.

We watched it shifting position. There was only one man it in. He cut off the engine when he had found his spot and we could just see him moving round the boat, putting in his lines and hauling them in. Even from where we stood half a mile away the air was clear enough so we could see a quickening in his movement as fish were caught and their glint and magic as they came out of the water.

‘You have been here a day and you have not been out on the water’ the man said.

‘You’ll still be tight up from your time away from here and how much time have you here now. Is it just a week? If you want to catch fish you want to be out there and not drinking pints with me.’

He finished his glass and rolled it in his hand so the ice made a noise inside of it.

With the engine off the boat drifted slowly from left to right. After a while that movement would take it away from where the fish were shoaling and the man would pull in his lines and put on the engine to take the boat back again.

‘Well if you are here tomorrow the sun will be shining again and you can have your fish then.’

I started to write this thinking that I could remember something that Elizabeth David had written about cumin. I picked up the book I thought it was in and typically could not find it. In my minds eye there was a lengthy passage on cumin being one of the best of spices and why that should be – but having gone through all the entries listed in the index I could not find it.

So you will have to take my word for it as opposed to Ms David’s.

It is a secret ingredient that I always use when making chilli con carne. The idea of using it for this came, I think, from one of the first cook books I was ever give The Rock’n’roll Cook Book which was put together by the wives or girlfriends of a couple of half famous rock stars. It consisted of recipes donated by various dodgy mid-1980’s rock stars of one sort or other often accompanied with pictures of them in the kitchen. It may be worth digging out to see what Sting was doing.

I think the recipe for chilli was given by Don Henley and the one thing I took from it was always add a few shakes of cumin powder. He was right.

The best way to get the full benefit of cumin is to grind it up yourself so that you can take in the full force of its warming and gentle smell.

I cooked the chilli having got back from a family walk up Velvet Hill round the back of Llangollen.