I find it difficult to let more than a couple of weeks go by without a visit to Rightway. If you haven’t got one of their stores nearby you are missing out. Ostensibly they are a DIY shop but it is a lot more than that. It sells fireworks when you want them, enamel tins for making proper pies, odd pieces of garden equipment, a wide range of bird feeds and food, odd things you might need for a fire, proper metal coal scuttles and useful plastic boxes.

This afternoon I was after a plastic box. Whilst I was in there I picked up a pack of seed potatoes.

As I was paying a woman rushed in and picked something off a rack near the till and asked in a rush, ‘Does this glue anything?’ She had in her hand a tube of Superglue.

The assistant who wasn’t serving me looked at the woman. ‘More or less.,’ she said. ‘But it depends on what it is you are glueing/’

‘It’s tooth,’ The woman said. ‘The dentists are closed and I need to glue back a tooth.’

The assistant paused for a second.’ I’m not sure I would recommend it for that.’

So three excitements this morning.

The first was when the greengrocer Kazim gave me a kar of mango jam he had made from the recipe I had given him last week. He had added some of the blacks seeds from a cardamon pod for flavour. It it looks deep, sweet and tasty and will good on toast tomorrow morning after my kipper.

In the supermarket I was buying beer for myself including some bottles of Franziskaner Weissbier – 3 for £5.00 being too good to resist. I joined the queue at the checkout and lifted out my shopping to put on the black belt to the till. As I lifted one of the bottles out its cap caught on the metal side of the trolley and pulled off so a stream of foamy beer covered me and the floor. I held the bottle up in my hand as beer gushed out. The man in front of me turned and winked and tipped up his hand.

I was back in Birkenhead before lunch meeting Galen on his break from Wards. As I walked back home I passed the grocers again and noticed a tray of artichokes that I had not seen before. I bought four. We’ll have them for lunch tomorrow.

Of such things, I guess, are Saturday mornings made.

I woke with a dry sour taste in my mouth. With my head still on the pillow and keeping my eyes closed I put my mind back through the last stages of the evening before. The man with a back beard would not allow me to fall asleep pushing my head off his shoulder and insisting that I drink another two pints so as to see my way through the rest of the evening. Hegarty had gone home at some point and the man and I were back standing at the bar as Sinead started to close the place down, wiping down the wood and turning off the lights  until there was just one bulb left on above the till in the corner. The curtains were closed.

‘Its raining again,’ Sinead told us.

‘It’ll stop in the morning,’ the man said. ‘You watch it will be dry tomorrow and you’ll look at the blue sky and wonder how there could ever be such rain. You’ll be out fishing then.’

I nodded my head.

‘If it was dry I’d take you out now. Night is a good time to be fishing but you have to go out to where the water is deep. There’ll be a great black mass of them down there. They slow at night but still have to keep moving and so they move down away from the surface. The weight of that water pushes the oxygen they need more cleanly through their gills.’

‘And they are beautiful fish at night. Pull them out of the water as the moon is up and the colours there on their belly will wink at you and it will seem a shame to have to kill them and eat them. But that’s what we do and then we go out and get them again.’

‘I’m going home now,’ and he walked to the door and opened it and went out into the night. We bowed our heads against the rain and he turned to walk up the hill. He looked at me.

‘Are you alright getting back?”

I nodded my head and turned to walk back down the hill towards the pier.

There was a pile of wet clothes next to the bed. The curtains were open and the sky was blue and I could see the view out across the bay to brown and green hills of The Mizen. I got out of bed and went downstairs to cook bacon for breakfast.

It was early evening and starting to get dark outside. We were onto our eighth pint. The man and I had moved from the bar and were sat in the corner of the room on the right hand side as you walk into the pub. We had been joined by a blonde man whose surname when I caught it was Hegarty. There were empty glasses on the table in front of us.

The man and Hegarty were talking and they had slipped into their accents and apart from the odd word I couldn’t follow them although it was apparent they were talking about ‘some feckin’ idiot who lost his cow.’

My tongue felt thick at the back of my throat  If they’d asked me a question it felt too full for me to get out an answer and the walk up to the bar for another pint looked to be too far.

The man looked at me. Despite the drink his eyes were still blue and clear.

‘Don’t fall asleep now. There’s the rest of the evening to come and then you can walk back to your cottage for your bed. A day like this is not a great deal. Feck it might slow you down a bit but you can still walk.’

‘His father,’ he looked over at Hegarty. ‘His father would stop here a dozen times over the day before stopping for the night. His farm was up the hill there along the side of the stream and he’d a field back there beyond where you are on the left up from the sea. So if he was working he’d have to take his tractor from the farm down to the field and back again. His first pint would be set up as they opened the curtains in the morning and then as he drove past through the day he’d stop for another. Feck if he was working hard he could be past the place a dozen times before six in the evening and as he worked harder there were more times to stop.’

‘He’d only be in for 12 minutes. Six minutes for them to draw down his pint, three minutes for the first drink and another three minutes to finish it off. So if he was drinking ten pints that would only be two hours out of the day. Not enough time to notice.Then he’d finish his work at six and would be here to relax and take a bit more time over his pints. That didn’t stop him from drinking them but he’d allow more than the three minutes to finish them.’

‘Once he was done for the evening then he’d climb back into his tractor to go home for something to eat. There were no lights on the feckin’ thing but he swore that he’d been doing it so long he could do it with his eyes closed and if he was here for a long night that’s how he was. If people worried he’d tap their head and swear to drive the thing slowly.’

‘But there was one year he missed the turn for the road up the hill and got onto the back road to Durrus. He had to walk home that night and he didn’t get there ’til past four in the morning all covered in black mud. It took them another three days to find the tractor. He’d got it stuck up the top of the hill down by one of the cuts where they used to cut peat. He had to drive his cows up there to help pull it out he got it stuck there so deep’

He turned his eyes back to Hegarty and I was lost from the words again as they went back to the ‘idiot cows lost on the hill.’ There was another full pint in front of us now and I took my pull at it and sat back on the bench my head against the thick hard blue wool of the man’s jumper.

I closed my eyes and thought of mackerel drinking pints and what they would taste like.