The Saturday after the Saturday of the party and Ireland now seems a very long way from Birkenhead.

When we left on Monday morning the sun was out and water looked pale and white across the bay. In the car we listened to the playlist that I had put together for the party and decided that it would be good to have another party sometime soon to give people a proper opportunity to listen to the playlist. We got to Dublin at least an hour early and so there was time to go in to the City, park up near The Liffey and find ourselves in Dublin’s oldest pub for a conciliatory pint of Guinness and a corn-beef sandwich.

The playlist is still on in the car shuffling out my favourite songs. It can be debilitating  to be driving along and have three or four songs come in a row each of which is guaranteed to make me go weak at the knees.

There are still clues to last week. I haven’t yet got round to putting the pink shirt I wore for fishing in the wash and it is still available for to take in its scent, a mixture of damp sea and the results of me using it to wipe my hands on it having gutted some mackerel.

There is a stuffed mackerel on a chair looking for a home and a seemingly endless pile of the pictures of mackerel drawn by the kids.

In order to make creative use of my time I have been looking up recipes for crab tart. I just need to find the crabs!