‘Feck. Did you know once, once there was a man who set himself the task of counting the stripes on a mackerel’s back.’

We both drank at our pints.

‘Jimmy Carroll he told me the story and showed me the paper this man wrote. His grandfather, James Carroll, was a fish merchant in Kinsale on Fisher Street and he had a shop on The Pier, and the man wrote to him letters asking questions about the fish that he sold. The man, Walter Garstang, if there is such a name was a professor and a fellow of some sort, a college, in Oxford.

‘Back then the men would catch mackerel by dropping rocks in the water. They’d take two boats out and one of those boats would have a net in and the other would be filled with pieces of stone and there would be six men in each boat…