A FRIEND keeps two hives of bees. He took honey from the hives the day before I called. He asked me to taste it. I love honey anyway but this tasted very special, aromatic, succulent, pure.

As my palate rejoiced I reflected that I was tasting the essence of the summer of '07 and, incredibly, within 48 hours, that summer would be gone and the ember days upon us.

Because of all the rains and cold winds the first of the swallows are already hosting on the coastline to get back to the sun a fortnight early. We did not get as horrific a summer as they had in England but, to put it mildly, it was sunless and wet.

Ironically it was still one of the best summers of my whole lifetime. I meandered constantly through the island and told ye about the most of those meanders.

The relish of the evenings was sharpened by the fact that I was writing a weekly series about the good old pubs of Clare for a local paper. Best assignment of all time!

And I met a lot of interesting characters along the way, heard a lot of music, sang a lot of songs, drank my share. What matter then if it was raining outside? Divil take the hindmost!

The night after the honey, for example, I was again in the seaside town of Kilkee visiting a few pubs there. In one of them I met a lovely octogenarian lady whose late husband was for many years a correspondent for the Dublin newspapers.

They were the penny-a-word men on whom the papers depended very heavily. And because they were indeed paid by the word they knew how to spin great yarns and how to generate them when necessary.

It was not this lady's husband but another of the breed who, when the Russians shot the dog Lykia into space decades ago, went out into the country to a farmer whose dog had died of old age. He took the body, attached some wires to it, made a rude steel cage, and dispatched stories to all the Dublin papers about poor Lykia's corpse, and the remains of her spaceship, having been discovered on the remote west coast of Ireland.

They all fell for it. Even at the rate of a penny a word he told me afterwards he had a great Christmas altogether!

Kilkee, incidentally, is a lively resort particularly popular with the citizens of Limerick. We have had a fine few days to mark the passing of August and they filled the pub I finished up in with a lively company already looking forward to the hurling final which Limerick reached for the first time in decades but, unfortunately, they lost.

The singing started early and finished late, and there was a standup lady comic who was as good as any professional. And a former showband singer who recreated his youth, strummed an umbrella like a guitar, and was good enough to make us all believe that, yes, Elvis never ever really died.

And the good publican and his wife gave myself and my friend a bed for the night and a breakfast the next morning.

After breakfast we strolled through the sundrenched town. The bay was filled with boats of all shapes and sizes, it was all warm and friendly. You'd think the summer was only starting.

And somewhere along the way I met a lovely retired schoolteacher from Dundalk who once taught the popular singing group the Corrs and who, even then, knew that they were special.

Coming home my wise friend said that we are now in the days of Murphy's Law. So we are.

In bad summers Murphy has al-ways dictated that

the weather will sharply improve from the first Monday of Septem-ber, the day all the children go back to school. It's true too.

The poor things are driven out of their minds with boredom by rainy weeks during their holidays. First day back to school and the sun is splitting the stones outside.

And that same wise friend said something else when I dropped him back home and told him about the quality of the honey I'd tasted the day before. "Do you know that honey is the only food that never goes off, that never goes stale?" is what he said.

I'll remember that.