‘Feck the feckin’ feck the feckin’ fecks got my finger.’

The afternoon had started well but with Pat O’Mahoney’s burst of extravagant language the chairman’s heart sank .

One of the two nuns looked at her sister and shook her head sadly ‘Was that the ‘f’ word I heard in there?’

The sister had been listening carefully ‘No dear I think he managed to avoid that word he was only feckin’ the feck.’

The chairman cast his mind back over the afternoon.

Michael Noon had won the Turnip Throwing Cup, smashing all previous records, with the throw of a turnip grown by Edna O’Malley especially for the event. She claimed that a regular feed of rotten mackerel manure in the three weeks leading up to the competition gave the turnip an ability to sail through the air more quickly than turnips left to fend for themselves.

There had been some debate as to whether it was possible to extract enough manure to make it worthwhile feeding a turnip but Edna swore that she had her methods and that if you had a bucket to hand and squeezed them right as they came out of the water then a supply could be had. It was then a question of selecting the turnips for the feed. They only needed a few drops so it was no great bother.

Michael Noon put the win down to local knowledge of the hilly terrain from where he undertook the winning throw and the strength in his throwing arm to time well spent hauling in lobster pots, others whispered that it was time less well spent lifting pints that built up the muscle.

The Car Smash had gone a treat. Patrick O’Riordan had donated his old pink Mini Metro for the day and it had taken seventeen youngster, togged in goggles and helmets, to reduce it to a pile of broken and twisted metal, plastic and glass with a sledgehammer over the course of the afternoon. There were a few injuries but these had come about more from a misapplication of the sledgehammer rather than anything to do with the car. The hunt was now on for another Mini Metro that could be donated for next year’s festival.

The swim races and raft race and all passed off with no incidents. There had been acrimony in previous years with there being a suggestion that some of the youngsters were not as young as they claimed and there had been a manipulation of birthdates. There problem came to a head when two six foot lads with too much hair on their legs claimed they were eligible for the under thirteen freestyle across the bay. They had been allowed to compete but some of the smaller lads all but drowned in their wake. The Chairman’s bright idea that all competitors produce a certified copy of their passport had brought some order to the event .

A last minute replacement for the duck chase had been found and it proved to be eminently suitable keeping the competitors at bay for a good ten minutes and it was adept at getting away just has some lad was about to make a grab for its tail-feathers through the water. The winner had able to keep a hold of the duck without breaking its neck and there was general agreement that it should be kept available for next year.

There was a great deal that had been a success but now as an arc of bright blood smeared it self over the pier the chairman had to gird his loins in order to deal with the root cause Pat O’Mahoney’s burst of extravagant language

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.

Ten years ago we had friends staying with us in the Cottage and some of us were celebrating our fortieth birthdays so we had at least two good long lunches at The Good Things Café.

Since then we have been back two or three times each year – normally for lunch with children and then a meal in the evening.

This year we had lunch there on Easter Sunday and we have just been back for another Sunday lunch.

It was a good day to go out for lunch; a squally wind bringing in thick wet rain that hadn’t stopped since we opened the curtains.

It was a day to spend another hour in bed reading, drinking cups of coffee and sitting around fires.

There were eleven of us eating for lunch and they had a table laid out for us by the door as we walked in. As we ate we could watch the weather outside, more wind and rain heavy enough to soak a person on the five-yard walk from the car park to the door of the café.

I had gazpacho to start, a bowl full of pale red cool soup the surface broken by a dash of olive oil – it tasted of garlic, tomatoes and the sun and was a stark contrast to the bluster and hell for leather of the weather outside. Others had the fish soup and it came to the table in two large white tureens, thick enough to stand a spoon in there were so many pieces of fish and other goodies from the sea swirling around in it.

Unfortunately there was only a limited amount of crab tart so I couldn’t have that, instead I went for an Egg Florentine with a thick slab of Gubbeen ham, layers of spinach, a poached egg and a silky slather of hollandaise sauce.

We were all stuffed but managed to find room for pudding and I had a small pot of St Emillion chocolate mousse, which is probably the same pudding I had on one of those lunches ten years ago.

It was just as good on Sunday as it would have been ten years ago.

As we drove back there was a break in the weather. It came at that part of the coast road where it turns back towards the sea and over a slight rise the whole of Dunmannus Bay is laid out open in front of you. The end of the Bay was filled with a great wall of grey cloud but over towards the hills of the Sheep’s Head the sun was trying to melt the clouds away and they were turned a bright white that then seemed to fill the air beneath them with luminous light that hung in the air in front of the grey cloud and the moutains.

Later that afternoon I watched the fleet returning from the mackerel competition. It had stopped raining around four o’clock so they had had a couple of hours fishing out of the wet. They still looked fairly bedraggled as they came in.

I had spoken about the competition the previous evening in the pub and was reassured that it was only a bit of fun. But they took it seriously enough to make sure that each box of fish was properly counted so there could be no doubt over who had one. The winning boat had caught more than 600 fish so that was a lot of counting to do under the eager eyes of the spectators and quick hands looking to dive in and secrete a couple of fish in a plastic bag to be taken home for tea.

Willem won the competition again and he filled the cup with whiskey and passed a sip on to every man on the team.

Down on the slip way a battery of grim faced men and women took to the mackerel with sharp knives, filleting them and throw the heads and bones to an eager and raucous audience of gulls. The gulls fought over the scraps tearing at the pieces of fish and each other. After twenty minutes the gulls quietened down as if they had filled themselves with the surplus of easy fish. An hour later they bobbed on the water too fat to fly ducking their heads under the surface to clean off their beaks.

Later we walked to The Tin Pub to see what music was on. Brian and Nicole were playing but around the bar there were a few familiar faces from last time we had seen good music in there. We got out pints and other drinks and settled down.

Brian and Nicole played a couple of sets but then they took a step back and over the rest of the evening the familiar faces moved behind the microphone to sing and play a song. Instruments were swapped and passed round; there was a penny whistle and an accordion as part of the mix.

At some point in the evening Hugh was able to establish that fifteen years previously he had seen one of the woman who was singing perform in Arundel’s Bar. On that occasioned she had sung a ribald version of the old Smokie Song ‘Alice’. She reprised it for the evening and the fifty or so people crammed into the bar singing along to the chorus ‘Alice, Alice? Who the feck is Alice?’

Then there was dancing and stamping of feet and more dancing until seemed there wasn’t anyone in the bar who wasn’t going to take their turn with a guitar and the microphone.

We staggered home at 2.30 in the morning the rain coming down like a gentle mist.

There were two men driving tractors who each took a bet as to who would take more time driving their vehicle through Schull.

The track was laid out from the welcome sign on the road along from the Mizen, down through the Main Street, where there was the most potential for congestion, and then on to the road out to Ballydehob and the sign that said ‘See you again.’

In a car on a good day the journey should take no more than a couple of minutes but the men reckoned that with a fair wind, bad weather and some foreign drivers they could spin the journey out to at least a good hour.

Their tractors were big vehicles; the width of a car and half again with wheels the height of a man and at least a foot thick. With an average car parked on either side of the Main Street there should be just enough room to squeeze one of them through the gap in the middle, but all that it took was a car too big or badly parked and the tractor would have to stop and wait for whoever might be driving the car to step out and move it.

They set down some rules. If the tractor was stationary for more than five minutes or there were at least four loud parps from different cars stuck behind it then the driver would be obliged to step down from his cab and investigate the shops to try and find the driver of the offending car.

So much the better if the driver should a parent who had taken time out to send children into one of the shops to be kept quiet with ice-cream. The gathering audience would be able observe as the errant father emerged from his shop having placating his brood to be presented with the sight of his car being the root cause of the horns and general unhappiness outside.

The ideal was to get in to a situation so that the tractor was coming down the hill with a hire car of some sort travelling the opposite way. The tractor driver would have to drive sufficiently slowly so as to lure the hire car and any cars following into the main drag of the Main Street to a point where there was no reversing for either the tractor or the hire car. At this point the driver of the tractor was entitled to disembark so as to able to provide useful but useless guidance to the hapless driver of the hire car.

If the driver of the hire car spoke no English then so much the better. If English was spoken then the tractor driver was allowed to thicken his accent. Either way he would ensure that the hire car was addressed as ‘this feckin’ car’ but with a smile so that no offense was intended.

If a queue of cars developed then the tractor driver would be able to walk along to each in it to set out the predicament. Once at the back of the queue and down to the last car he would start on his instructions to reverse up. He would wave the car backwards, taking it slow so that no damage was done, and either park the car up in a space on the street or manoeuvre it into one of the side roads where it could block further traffic to come.

There was a great deal to be had in the timing. Mid afternoon worked best as then there would be a tide of cars driving up from the harbour. They would be able to back down on the Pier Road and the addition of four or five cars down there could only add to the confusion on Main Street. If horns parped down there then they were free to go at it as they pleased. But added delay could be had with a diversion down there to explain something of the problem and to put the blame on ‘the feckin’ car that some feck can’t drive being stopped up the hill with nowhere to go.’

Points were to be had if the maximum distress and unhappiness could be reached outside of Hackett’s. There an audience would be sat with the benefit of a good lunch and a few pints well able to appreciate the slow grinding of gears and the dissipating of humour as cars were locked into stalemate for an hour or so in the heat of an afternoon.