Most summers when we go to Schull lunch is taken at the fish’n’chip shop down by the pier. Tables laid out in the sun, fish fresh from the sea and fried almost in front of you before being piled into cartons with mounds of thin chips and balanced precariously on plastic trays to be eaten with relish with a bottle of cold Muscadet drunk out of small plastic glasses.

This year the weather in Schull was grey and full of impending wet so we didn’t make past the lure of the dark interior of Hackett’s.

We were squeezed onto the end of an table by two ladies who were having a long lunch talking about seaweed courses at the Good Thing’s Cookery School and how many bales of hay one of them was able to bring in from her fields.

I had an open crab sandwich; a pile of white crab meat on top of thick chunks of brown soda bread with pint of Murphy’s to wash it down.

After lunch, buoyed up with the Murphy’s I bought myself a smart new shirt and another stylish hat.

There was a satisfactory amount of traffic blocking up Main street.