At this time of year Tommy catches prawns. They are langoustines, Dublin Bay Prawns but Tommy just calls them prawns. He catches them in pots similar to a lobster pot but lighter and with a smaller hole. He keeps his catch in the water until he has enough to put in the back of his van for the drive to Inniswiddy where they are quickly shipped off to France.

Over the last few weeks he has lost some his catch to the fresh water coming down into the bay from the hills. The rest are packed into small individual containers so the don’t kill each other. The containers are about the size of a large cigar tin just under an inch square and five perhaps six inches long. Just big enough for a prawn. They are slipped in tail first claws uppermost and then stacked in small crates all held together with rubber bands.

The crates are a mix of colours and sizes. On the day I watched him come in it was a low tide. He put his boat Freedom at the head of the pier and Joe climbed the ladder and opened up the back of the van. Tommy stayed in the boat and had to stand on a crate so as to be be able to pass up the boxes of prawns to Joe.

‘Hardest work of the day,’ he said.

Once all the crates were loaded onto the pier Tommy climbed up the steel ladder and started to sort them in the back of his van.

‘They’ll die if they’re out of water too long,’ he said. There was a man watching and he suggested that Tommy could fill the back of his van with water. ‘Feckin’ hell,’ he said.’ I could try that but I don’t know it would hold all the way down to France.’

‘Will you be getting some more?’ I asked him.

‘Well I’ll be in on Monday or Tuesday about 5.00 and there should be a bag I can pass over.’

Then he was off backing his silver van down the pier to get his prawns to Inniswiddy so they could be shipped off to France still alive and good.

He wasn’t out on Monday but on Tuesday morning we could see his boat out in the middle of the Bay. He came in as I was walking up to the pub for a lunchtime pint and I wandered down to talk with him. We started on the weather.

‘Feckin’ hell its cold,’ he said. Although the sun was out the wind still whipped in from the East scouring the water and leaving it a pale bright blue.

‘It is getting better next week but you’ll be gone by then but it should be right for the summer. The weather it’s not been so bad this year and the fishing has been good but feck on a day like this it is cold on the hands out there. Here these are for you’ He reached into the front of his van and handed me a white plastic bag full of prawns. He took E10.00 for them and I carried them back to The Cottage. They were still alive and fresh from the sea a bright pink against the white of the bag.

Having put them in the fridge I carried on with my walk to the pub and picked up a pint to drink as I cooked them.

To do that I half filled the large steel pan with sea water and put it on to boil. Once it was at a rolling boil I took the prawns out of the fridge and tipped them into the pan. They were cooked in the time it took me to have another two sips at my pint.

Once they were done I drained them and arranged them neatly on a large plate.

We had them cold for lunch pulling apart the hard shells to prise out the nuggets of firm white meat within.

Later that afternoon the sun came out and it was almost not cold enough for me to write some of this outside looking over the bay.

It had been raining all day. A thick incessant rain that gets under your collar as soon as you go outside. The sky was grey and unyielding apart from a few minutes in the morning when the sun seemed to scratch at the top of the clouds trying to peel them away and then gave up. On the circle of concrete around the top of the pier the water puddled and turned murky before slipping down the drains.

All around the bay flashes of white caught against the light, streams flush with the water from the hills. Up close on the road from Durrus the streams disgorge themselves over the pebbles and stone and in that small distance from hill to water the colours change. Behind the road they are brown and of the earth almost invisible with peat and moss and then there is that last few yards into the sea over black rocks and seaweed and there is a churn of water white and excitable.

It was a good day to go out for lunch at The Good Things Café. The clocks had gone forward  which meant that the two o’clock came round more quickly. This was unlike years ago when we made the mistake of putting our watches back instead of forward and arrived for lunch at Heron’s Cove just as they were starting to close the kitchen at 3.00. Fortunately they felt sorry for us and managed to fit us in.

Lunch at The Good Things Café was from a fixed menu of three courses. The starters were either a Jerusalem artichoke soup with cheese or a salad also made with Jerusalem artichokes with some green leaves, shavings of hard cheese and a dressing of anchovies, garlic and oil.

The mains were pan fried hake with mashed potato and braised fennel, roast lamb with roast potato and aubergine with a yogurt dressing and a growers plate of local seasonal vegetables with a beetroot risotto.

Pudding was either meringue, rhubarb fool and stem ginger or a chocolate chilli fondant. The chocolate fondant came piping hot and molten with a small pot of cream.

Everything was plate licking good.

The following morning there was a Great Northern Diver on the water white throated for winter dipping its head in the water before tipping under diving deep for fish. On the beach two grey hooded crows were picking up shells in their beaks flying up about ten feet in the air then dropping the shells onto the rocks on the beach.

Goode would finish his pint satisfied with the limit of his conversation and walk back down to his cottage and the men would be left in the pub with their note on his anticipation for the weather. Most evenings then there would be a few more men that would stop by the pub.

It was Paddy O’Donovan who would normally keep the note and so it would him that would start the book. ‘You heard what he said. It’ll be raining tomorrow and then clear in afternoon. Feck any man can say that. Just look at the sky there. If he’s right I will buy in a pint for whatever man is in here. And if he’s wrong  and if there is a drop of rain that falls after midday well I won’t expect to pay for a pint until next time that man is in here.’

The pub was busier than usual the next day. There were thirty or so men sat in here and some of them had brought their wives and children. The day had started wet with the rain coming in with the wind off the sea and looking out from here you could see great sheets of it as if the clouds were letting go of a tap and it came down so hard that it had settled the water. But by 11.00 in the morning it had cleared and there was a blue sky all over. So the pub was full of the men who were going to take their pint off Paddy O’Donovan. Paddy he was late down to the pub that evening but he came with a pocket full of notes and be bought those pints.

It was a week before Goode was back in the pub and the same men were sat there by the bar and in their corner and when he walked in it went quiet for some minutes whilst his pint was poured and the men waited for him to start talking about the weather. Well he did once his pint had settled and then men took a note when he told them what he had worked from his radio.

Once he had gone, walked back down the hill to his cottage, Paddy O’Donovan sat back in his chair then took a sip at his whiskey and said ‘Now you heard what he said. Dry tomorrow and no wind but cloudy until late afternoon. You all and some you frinds and their children had a drink from me last week here is my wallet.

‘Mary’ he called over the bar ‘ Mary you know its good. Which of you men here will say that he is right  and if he is wrong then my wallet here will be good for that man’s drink until he is in here with his talk of the weather.’

Well John Holland took him up on that and he got his drink bought for him for two weeks until the man Goode was back in here with his talk about the weather.

So the man Goode had his talk about the weather and gave no offense and the men there in the corner would take their pints as they come off the back of it.

The man Goode he was friendly enough but all he would ever talk about was the weather. Paddy there said he’d told him once he was worried about another topic of conversation for the sake of giving offence or the worry that what he said might get repeated. I think he may have lived too many years in Kenya and then India and he thought any locals must be the same and were a lazy bunch full of gossip and eager for the chance to exploit an outsider.

Well there might be some like that but there are others who would worry on the trouble he would cause with his talk of the weather. His trouble was that sometimes he would be right and sometimes he would be wrong.

There are plenty of those who will tell you that if you want to know about the weather then walk outside that door there and look up into the air and if its raining then your face will be wet and if the sun is out you will have to close your eyes against it and if the wind is blowing then you will feel that across your cheek. And if that isn’t enough and you are greedy and want to see what the weather will be doing then walk out to the end of the pier and look up to the top of the bay and you will see clear enough what the wind will be bringing down over the next half hour. Its all there if you want to look for it.

But the man Goode he had a radio he kept in the Cottage tuned to some station from England and that gave him the weather from the BBC. Well you’d have thought that that would be the best for the weather. But the BBC never made it down here with its weather and so he would have to drawn lines on a map to try and work up what the weather would be down here.

He’d be careful about it and I heard that somewhere he had an envelope full of the drawings he made but sometimes he’d be right and other times wrong no matter what those drawings of his told him.

He would come up here but once a week, maybe a Wednesday or Thursday about six in the evening and he would stand there at the bar and ask Mary for his pint. There would be a nervousness about him but he would hold himself there putting the small of his back against the bar and leaning his elbows down waiting to say his piece.

Those early evenings were not so different then. There would be a man or two stood here at the bar and a couple of others in the seat under the window.  All of them would have quietened as he came in waiting.

He would have his pint to hand and he would take a small take at it and allow it to settle.

‘Well how is the weather doing the next day or so?’

And there there would be a quick of voices all ready to say their bit. If it was warm and the sun had been out then that was it for the next few days but if the weather had been down and it was thick with rain the voices would lower and the men would complain about the summer and the incessant rain all waiting for the man Goode to say his bit.

Goode he would listened to the chat and the discourse and he would take some strength from his pint his back still against the bar.

Then he’d say ‘Boys’ addressing them all and they would quieten again ‘Boys the radio will have the weather and I have it for you’ and he would give out the forecast.

He had a smart tight voice that would not hold for an argument but carry on until it had said what needed saying. So the next days weather was set out in his clipped voice and the men in the corner would take notes for later.

Goode would finish his pint satisfied with the limit of his conversation and walk back down to his cottage and the men would be left in the pub with their note on his anticipation for the weather.