It has been bright but windy for the last fortnight, so the best and ripest red apples from Maisie's sweetest tree have fallen from their perches about three weeks before their time.

There is a great crop this year, but there is a limit to the amount of the fruit that the Dutch Nation and I can devour so the thrushes and blackbirds are having a continuing banquet morning after morning.

I have delivered bags of windfalls to my neighbors and friends, yet still they fall and, yes, as in my childhood, some of the cock blackbirds are becoming as drunk as skunks.

I've watched the feeding frenzy and they go for the bruised areas of the windfalls, pecking voraciously into the areas where the juices are already fermenting inside the browning skin. We are talking 100 percent cider here, and cock blackbirds clearly cannot hold their drink.

Just as when I was a boy in the home orchard in Belnaleck they are staggering about the place, aggressive as hell, and when they attempt to fly they are largely operating on one wing. They are crashing into the briars and bushes amidst scenes of total mayhem and chaos.

They are fighting constantly. As a boy I once saw two drunken blackbirds involved in a fight to the death beneath the home orchard wine apple tree. The scene remains with me.

I'm likely enough to see as bad before this month is over because more and more of the windfalls are decaying brownly beneath the wise old tree, and daily there are more feeding birds and more cider.

It is interesting that the larger thrushes do not get involved in any battles at all. They simply drink away like seasoned old soldiers in the corner of a bar. They get quietly merry.

They are affected, though, because you can get close enough to them to pull a feather out of their tails before they are aware of your presence and take off serenely like one of the old flying boats that used ply into Foynes on the Shannon Estuary. 

Which reminds me that I am going to pilot a passenger jet to a European airport of my choice before this week is out. There's one for you. I'm going to fly a jet!

Furthermore it is not going to cost me a penny, never mind the £5 token fare that Michael O'Leary of Ryanair levies for such trips out of Shannon on a regular basis.

I'm going to fly the thing gratis as a gift from an interesting and decent man I met a few days ago by the name of Eddie Ryan on the mall of the Sky Center in Shannon Town. I may well take off as crookedly as the drunken cock blackbirds from under Maisie's tree, but I will get there safe and sound in the end.

Imagine, MacConnell is going to fly a jet. The way I feel at the moment I'm likely to fly to Barcelona in Spain because Patricia and two of my grandchildren are there and the sun is shining. Yes, it will be Barcelona. 

Eddie Ryan I meet by accident on the mall. He's a pleasant silvered man with sharp spectacles who is both a pilot and an aeronautical engineer.

For many years he inspected aircraft which were offered for sale to the British government, and if Eddie accepted them they were accepted, and if Eddie rejected them they stayed rejected. That's only a part of an interesting life.

Another interesting part is his recent launch of the Atlantic Adventure Park and aviation education center on the edge of Shannon town at Smithstown.

One voluntary element of that operation is that Eddie frequently gives free flights over Clare to disadvantaged kids from the region who otherwise would not have that facility available to them. Another element is that his high-tech simulators are frequently being used by regular airline pilots for their revision and refresher exercises.

And yet another element is to make dreams come true for landlubbers who always wanted to know what it was like to be in control of a jet plane. A recent Dublin client who "flew" to Zurich recently was so overcome with joy afterwards that he wept as he hugged his co-pilot.

It is such a simulated trip as this which I will make later this week to Barcelona, and I am guaranteed that I will get back to Shannon safely afterwards. I look forward to it. (To head off the inevitable contact queries ye can reach Eddie at the Atlantic Adventure Park on 011-353-87-2839091, and tell him Captain MacConnell sent you!)

And when you are next crossing the Atlantic you will have a much better idea of which buttons and levers the captain is pressing and shifting at any given time. 

For various work-related reasons I have not been meandering much for the last couple of weeks, but you don't have to travel far for craic.

After leaving Eddie I went further down the mall and there met Ciaran McCormack. Ciaran and I meet often in the Honk, and he's a great man to play the guitar, lead the singsong and get the craic into full flight.

Tonight, he tells me, is a 75th birthday party in Mrs. Anna O'Neill’s great little pub in Newmarket-on Fergus for his father Tomas. Tomas has also just retired as Shannon Town Clerk.

I know him well from my radio days and have always liked and respected a man of great integrity, courtesy and wit. I say I will go.

At the appointed hour of the evening I collect my singing neighbor Sean O'Ceallacain, and when we arrive at Mrs. Anna's (the perennial haunt of visiting U.S. senators and members of Congress) Tomas is outside the front door for a smoke and the craic is already started.

The man himself and myself and Sean share scraps of monologues there and then, including a scrap of the Man From God Knows Where which none of us can complete on the night, and then into the warm pub where the merriment is being spearheaded by the mighty Pat Costelloe from Shaskeen and Shannon, and by Tomas's two sons Ciaran and Cathal and the legendary hurler The Pudding Callinan, and supported by all in the house.

Sean and I arrange to be conveyed home by Pat's gentle teetotal wife Rita and relax for the evening and the night. It is great. Even in the west of Ireland in August nights like this don't happen every night.

I'd swear the old rafters are still ringing. The legendary Mrs. Anna's establishment goes on and on. And Rita got us home safe and sound in the wee small hours.

I mentioned Mayo here recently. I have to go there again. Whatever its flaws, the beautiful county has always been a peaceful place.

Even ongoing disputes like the current one between elements of the local population and Shell over the bringing ashore of oil from the Corrib Field offshore are handled with some kind of passionate decorum which minimizes the risk of injury to all concerned.

But something scary has happened in the county over the past couple of weeks. The scian (knife) has come out.

First a young policemen was stabbed and almost killed in a street affray in Castlebar. Then, horrifically, in the little town of Kiltimagh (home of the original culchies) a young man was stabbed to death. There have been other stabbings since, notably in the town of Ballinrobe, which have left at least one victim critically ill at time of writing.

And they all came out of the blue. There have been an increasing number of stabbing fatalities in Dublin over the past year, but nobody expects to see that kind of behavior in Mayo.

It's quite inexplicable, and the local population is shocked and frightened. Yesterday a middle-aged man climbed as a pilgrim to the summit of the holy Croagh Patrick mountain which towers over Mayo.

At the summit he was taken ill. He was brought into the small oratory on the summit and attended to as a helicopter was rushed to the scene. But he died in hospital later.

Somebody remarked to me that he died as close to Heaven as you can get in Ireland. And down below in the little towns and villages Heaven is a lot further away at the moment.

Finally, especially for all of you whose memories were racked by the mention of The Man From God Knows Where, I looked up the words and here is the first verse that neither Tomas McCormack nor myself could remember last week:

"Into our townland on a night of snow,

Rode a man from God-knows-where,

None of us bade him stay or go,

Nor deemed him friend, nor damned him foe,

But we stabled his big roan mare,

For in our townland we're decent folk,

And if he didn’t speak, why none of us spoke,

And we sat till the fire burned low …”

It was written by a lady called Florence Wilson. It concludes under the gallows tree like so many more.

And there's a grand ring to it.