Although it had stopped raining we had decided on a fifth pint. There was no real flow to the conversation. In fact the conversation was sparse but the company and the view through the window was enough. Out over the bay the sky was starting to clear and the grey clouds were starting to turn light and white and over the hills of The Mizen the blue sky was starting to widen. Maybe the man was right and there would be fish tomorrow.

We finished our pints and the man looked up at Sinead and she got off her chair and started to pour another round. As she left the pints to settle the man looked at her again and she turned her back to us and filled two glasses with Powers.

‘It’ll help settle the stomach,’ he said as we snatched them down. The taste of it was raw at the back of my throat and I had to catch at my breath as it went down.

The man waited until the pints were put in front of us. There was no need to hurry now. We’d had enough and from now on it was just down to greed.

‘You’ve had the cheese from round here and you know why its good. Feck you look at the rain that came down today and the colour it gave to the grass. If you spend your day eating something as green as that it will be good for you. Cows they are supposed to spend some time of the day with their other stomachs thinking on the grass that they’ve been chewing but when its raining like that they will spend all day eating it down and that is the grass that makes the milk that makes the cheese. Feck you want to taste some good cheese you could go out there and chew at some grass and it’ll give it to you.’

‘Now the man from Wales that I told you about. The man Jones. He had some thoughts on the making of cheese. He kept his goats and if you have heard it right there are still some deep cracks in the rocks there where he put his rounds of cheese so that it would be ready. Jones would tell you that all good cheese started with goats and not cows and the cheese you got from a cow was cheating.’

‘Jones said that the making of cheese was easy. The first man to do it kept goats for their milk and they drank it at the end of the day and that was enough. Then one of those goats  cracked its neck or something and was left there dead for some days and when it was found there was nothing to be done. But the man who found it he took a knife to the pink balloon under its back legs and the milk there had gone hard and when he took it back home it lasted a while and they tasted it and it wasn’t so bad’

‘Now with a story like that you’d expect them to be up in the hills waiting for the next goat to break its neck so they could have more cheese. Well maybe they did for a while but them one of them just took the stomach from a dead goat and left it there with the milk and they were found with cheese.’

‘Its too sour for me,’ he said and we took at our pints.

The man had a question for me.

‘What do you go back for? You are here for your two weeks in the summer and you’re back here again when you can and I’ve heard you say it that away from here you’re never really sure if you’re ok. Away from here and no feckin’ pint in your hand it is only “I think.” well what is the feckin’ good is “I think.” ‘

‘Sinead,’ he said. ‘Will you set up two more pints for us both I have to tell this man something and he needs to listen close.’

He steadied himself with his hands against the wooden bar. His hands were big and heavy   and the joints in his fingers were thick with use and the weather.

‘Now I’ve asked you that question and I know your answer. You have a nice home there to go to and a job that pays for it all. But what the feck is a job. A job is a way to knit your bones together and when you are tied up in knots and can’t move well then you drop dead and what the feckin’ use are you dead.’

He picked up my right hand and pushed at the palm hard with his thumb. He looked at me with his blue eyes and I had to look away to where Sinead was pouring the pints.

‘Your fingers are soft with money,’ he said. ‘Back there you’ll sit at a chair and there’ll be a screen in front of you and you’ll tap at some words. Is that what you do? Feck the money’ll be good but you’ll be a fool to want it for that.’

He put my hand down as Sinead put the pints in front of us. We picked them up and drank at them keenly. We were onto our fourth pint.

‘Look out there,’ he said. ‘The rain it will stop soon and there’ll be mackerel out in the bay. You’ll take your boat out and catch some tomorrow but wait ’til the late afternoon and the tide will have turned and you will get a bucket full then. Cook them and eat them straight out of the water and you will be done.’

‘You’ll be half right,’ he said. ‘It is not so good here when you are here every day and its not stopped raining for a month and there is feck all to do but catch fish that are gone and sit and talk about the weather. The ground here is hard and when its not hard it is thick with mud and try make your peace with that. But there’ll come a time or a day when the knots that come with all that will start to unravel for a while and you won’t get that back where you come from.’

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen, I’m talking shite.’ This time he put his hand over mine on the bar and I could feel the weight of him pressing down before he took his hand away to pick up his pint.

‘Now a pint will unravel you soon enough but I come back to my question and why do you go back?’

The rain ran in sheets across the concrete apron at the top of the pier by the road gathering up before flowing through the drain. The stream by the side of The Butter House was in full spate brown water flattening the tall grass that normally stood proud in the dark corner under the eaves. On the walk up to the pub I had to skirt away from the edge of the road as more water ran down the slope. Up beyond the pub at the junction where the road turns left to the bridge over Ahakista Stream the trees and other vegetation hung low and green with the weight of the damp in the air. There was something obscene about the greenery it was so thick with rain. The water around the pier was flattened by it and cloudy and brown with soil brought down from the hills.

In the pub I shook the water from my hat and plastic coat and walked up to the bar. Sinead started to pour me my pint.

The man with a black beard was stood there as well. His glass was empty and he nodded his head when I asked if he wanted another. He wore a thick blue jumper and there was nothing about him to suggest that he had been out in the wet.

‘Feck. This weather is bad for the fish and it will rot a potato as it lies in the ground.’

Our two pint glasses were filled slowly but with purpose. When they were done we took our glasses and drank at them.

‘This will be done in a day or so and the sun will be out again for a while and a day or so after it clears the fish will be back. They are greedy for it now and won’t be away for long no matter what shit gets washed down from the hills.’

‘Its the rain in late Spring that does for them. They can taste the bad water out there beyond the heads before they come into the bay and if there’s been too many days of rain they’ll keep away and go somewhere else for their food.’

‘There was a year once it rained every day all day for a month in May. Feck it was wet then. Every road from here up to Durrus it was covered in water and you had to splash through it even to get out of the house. There were people who left for good that year and didn’t come back they went mad with the sound. If it is wet for so many days there is a sound that comes with it all. It is not just the drum thump of the rain it is the way that it traps the air so the noise of anything cannot get out and forms tight around you.’

‘There were feck all fish to be had that summer and the lobsters were only thin blue things and hardly worth the catching.That was twenty years ago and it has not been so bad since.’

We drank again at our pints and outside the rain swept up the bay.

I have heard it suggested by the occasional visitor to this blog that it does not portray an entirely accurate picture of the household in Birkenhead. Where are the children who would rather sing and dance than lay the kitchen table for supper? Where are the raised voices and the shouts of dissent? Does it ever rain in the garden?

Well it rained in the garden yesterday afternoon. It started just as I thought I had half an hour to plant some seeds in the vegetable plot. So there was a quick five minutes pulling the washing from the line. I convinced myself that it was only a fine drizzle but by the time I got back outside it had settled down into a fine heavy rain so I had to go back into the house to find a waterproof jacket. As I bent over the soil to fork out a shallow trench in the soil to lay the seeds in the rain collected down the back of my neck and ran down to soak my trousers.

Back inside it was late afternoon and the kids were finishing off homework and wanting to print it off for the next day. There was a loud wail as one of them realised that the printer was out of ink. The was just enough time to squeeze down to PC World to spend £25.00 I was not expecting to spend on two new cartridges.

At home the dishwasher was still not working so before starting on dinner there was another round of washing up to be done. I started to fill the sink and reached for the washing up liquid on the shelf underneath and realised the shelf was covered in water and it was spewing down from where the plug should have been holding it in. I then noticed that a piece of metal round the plug in the small second sink was loose. I was able to unscrew it and found underneath a layer of black gunk that looked like it had been accumulating over the last five years.

It was like a picture from a newspaper expose into the kitchen of a dodgy backstreet takeaway. There was nothing for it but to get my fingers stuck in to clear it out. Rather to my surprise once the gunk was removed and the pieces of metal screwed tightly back in the sink worked and the leak had gone.

We finished off lasts night’s late lunch for supper this evening eating up the chicken with forkfuls of giant couscous. Whilst making a vain attempt to clear some space on a shelf I had come across a Kilner jar of sun dried tomatoes in olive oil. I am fairly sure the tomatoes were bought about seven years ago when we went to Verona for a week. They were black in the oil and tasted old and intense. I chopped a few of them up to mix into the couscous along with half a red onion, garlic, parsley and dill.

Now watch this to see how to make a frittata.