There are two pubs in Ahakista. Most of time is spent in Arundel’s. It is closer and close enough for us to be able take the odd few pints back down the road 100 yards to the Cottage. In fact quite a lot more than a few pints head down that way. All you need is to be careful of are fishermen on the pier who will eye your pint greedily as you walk past and you might be compelled to hand one over.

Christy Moore spotted me one year. He was driving past in a black Lexus and I was carrying a tray of pints. He slowed down, put his head out of the rolled down window and told me to be careful with my precious load.

The other pub is another few hundred yards up the road The Tin Pub next door to Ahakista House. It does what it says on the tin seemingly knocked together with pieces of corrugated iron and wood. It has been given a lick of paint over the last few years but it can still be a dangerous place late on a Saturday evening when there is singing going on in  the the corner and dancing outside.

I was in the bar one mid afternoon in summer. It was hot outside and the front door was open to the road. The pub nestles amongst trees and their shade kept the bar cool. I was by myself apart from the dog. Patrick had been working behind the bar  but he was outside now sorting bottles from the night before.

The man with a black bear walked in. He nodded at me shortly before putting his arms on the bar. We waited a few minutes and listened to the clink of bottles outside.

‘Patrick’ he shouted ‘I’ll get one myself.’

He went behind the bar and took down a glass and started to pour. ‘Do you need another,’ he asked me. Before I could answer he’d taken down another glass and started to fill that. The glasses were almost filled and he left them to settle. As they did that he went to the corner and put on some music. He then went back to the glasses and filled them until the white head started to spill over. He wiped at the drips with his fingers before lifting the pints up. He put one on a mat in front of me and the other went to where had been standing at the bar.

“You leave it a while’ he said. ‘Let it quiet down. It’ll be better for a few minutes more rest.’.  He came back from around the bar and stood next to me.

‘You need to leave it to settle. Its been in that silver barrel and on the back of a lorry from Cork. Now its out in the air give it some time to breathe before you drink it. It will be gone soon enough and then we can bring out some more to air a while.’

He put his arms back down on the bar and set down to wait.

Is there any more brutal sound than Led Zeppelin in excelsis. A few years ago they released an album culled from various shows they played on the West Coast of the US in the early 1970’s. It was probably overdubbed to death but it doesn’t really matter because in parts it contains some of the most overwhelmingly loud music you could ever hope to get to listen to on a cold Friday night when there are very few other people in the house (sorry neighbours!)

The third CD starts with a 23 minute version of Whole Lotta Love, which here is a good thing, at least for the opening four or five minutes particularly when it appears that Jimmy Page is playing his guitar with a sledgehammer. That is then followed by a more concise (at 3:56) version of Rock and Roll on which Jimmy and his sledgehammer is joined by John Bonham playing his drums with sticks as thick Mike Tyson’s neck.

So I pour myself a beer and clear the head for a few minutes putting to one side the knackered laptop, bills and my ever diminishing bank balance. The head has been cleared and there is a lump of pork in the oven with crackling, stuffed with garlic, fennel, chillies and sage.

I will have to go talk to the man with the black beard.

‘The man Jones he lived up in an old stone cabin by the copper mines at Gortavellig. You’ll only have been there when its summer and the sun has been shining and even then there can be a tough wind that blows in from the sea. But you be there in the winter and although you may be a hundred foot up from the bottom of the cliffs the sea will still get there it hits so hard. The wind it comes in, it has nowhere else to go and it can be bleak up there and hard. You need a particular mind to stay there for long when its dark and the wind is up. The old mines, the holes in the rock Christ it can howl through there and the noise it makes can be heard for good miles round.’

‘Jones, he scrapped out some ground from the rocks and grew his potatos and greens. You know the pond there. The miners they built it up from lumps of rock and plugged it with moss and a hundred years it has been there. Filled with rain mostly but you could hardly call it fresh water given what gets blown in from the sea but it is enough to live on I guess. But you know how salt water will send a man mad. I’m not saying it was enough to send him mad but the spume and foam that blows up there would weaken the mind. Feck you’d need a weak mind to live there.’

‘You can’t see it now but he had a tidy piece of ground. And in the summer he would walk back from there to Bantry on a Friday for the market. He’d not much to sell but they say he’d set himself down with a bag of leeks or onions and he’d sell enough for the day.’

‘Now I know its a long walk but you can do it in a day you get off early and be ready to get back late. The road down the northside well its always been there and it runs straight if you let it down by the sea.’

‘But what he had up there was goats. He got two of them on a Friday, the market in Bantry, and he walked them back that night. And goats being goats soon he had a small number of them up there. They say he talked to them and he had a path to take them down to the rocks at low tide so they could eat at the seaweed. A goat will eat at anything if you let it. He drank their milk and made a bit of cheese and every year he would sell some of the young goats at market.’

‘The cheese he’d wrap in small leaves he found in the hills and he’d let it go old and hard in some small cut he had in the rocks there. It’d break your teeth my grandfather said but it kept Jones going when there wasn’t much else to be eaten.’

‘Have you ever eaten goat now. I heard they eat it places but not often here. He said they had them at home where he came from in Wales. Now my grandfather said you never ate anything as good as those goats. It was the legs that were best. They had to be cooked slow but get it right they were the best piece of meat he ever had.’

‘There’s goats up on the top by Seefin still if you look quickly enough and I reckon they still eat at the seaweed. Now some there’s been they’ve tried to follow the path Jones took them down  to the sea but he hid it up well. I say we should leave well alone and Jones’ goats can carry on as they are.’

Still waiting for news on my laptop and now doing this on a second hand borrowed old machine held together by pieces of sellotape and hope. Still seems to work though which could be something to think about if the news on the laptop is bad.

In the meantime in half anticipation that all has been wiped and my failure to back up comes back to bite me I have started to revisit what I think is the last hard copy of the book about mackerel. Leafing through it would be no bad thing if I was forced to sit down and write the whole thing out again. There are a lot of rough edges and some defenestration would no doubt do it some good. You never know there could be a chance to give the man with a black beard some kind of voice in it. I am reasonably sure that so long as he got fed the occaisional pint he would have something to say on most of what’s in there.

There was the summer almost nine years ago when Galen was six. He was being a nuisance in the kitchen and in exasperation got sent up the pier to look at the boats. The Ahakista equivelent of ‘Go play with the traffic!’ He did what he was told and came back 10 minutes later holding a large brown crab and asking ‘What do I do with it?’

Later in the pub I asked the man with a black beard if he could tell me how he cooked his crabs.

‘The crabs that come in from the bay. All they are good for are the claws.I know its bad and there ‘s those who say its a waste but the rest of them is nothing but water. The meat in the claws is good though. And there is so feckin’ many of them out there there is no matter how many you catch they are still clambering to get into your pots.’

‘But the best crabs to eat are the ones you get down the pier.’ We looked out of the window. The two fishing boats were tied up at the end of the pier and there were a dozen other boats of different colour and size lined up behind up to the slipway. It was early evening and there were two childen down by the bottom of the slipway peering into the water lines in hand.

‘They are doing it now. You want to keep them busy then give them a line and some bacon. No good stuff mind. Or a piece of old meat. Tie that to your string and put it down there into the water by the wall. Now the skill, the skill of it is pulling them out the water. It is easy enough to watch ’em taking hold of your bait but then you need to tease them out of the water. And once you get them out of the water pull them up fast or they’re dropped off and gone.’

We pulled at our pints thinking on those crabs lost back to the water.

‘The shit that those little crabs eat. You’ve seen the dead fish that gets thrown into the water there. They get fat on that. It doesn’t matter what those crab eat they still taste good. Are those yours out there?’ He pointed to the two small girls at the slipway. ‘You  get them to fill up that backet. Give them a washing in some clean water and then boil them up. They are green and dirty now but in two minutes they will be bright and red. You leave them to cool for a while and you can eat them then. There’s no need to peel them. Take a good bite and you can pull out with your tongue all that is good.’