cormac150

A Mighty summer altogether so far in all but the weather of the last couple of weeks, and that's improving by the day too. Not so much rain anymore, just showers every so often.

"They're flooded out in England," says Davy Martin, "that they may get a lot more of it." He's a Republican with a long memory is Davy.

We're past the longest day, but the evenings are still long and mainly golden. There's a New Moon tonight and it's clear.

I went out to see it a half-hour ago, intending to go to the Honk for a pint, but the Dutch Nation and I are still recovering from a weekend wedding, and the token turf fire in the hearth is so inviting that I stay at home and have a shot of Jameson instead and listen to the radio.

"The radio is better than TV for any Irishman," says Davy Martin, "because we have better pictures inside our heads than anywhere else to put on top of the sounds from the radio."

He's full of wise sayings is our Davy. He worked in the Merchant Navy for 20 years from when he was young and saw the whole world 5 1/2 times. That's high education.

The wedding was in Kilshanny Chapel and afterwards in the Falls Hotel in Ennistymon. I used work in the radio station with the groom, Darren, a lovely lad. He found himself a beautiful wife in Caroline.

I sat on an outside bench alongside Caroline's grandfather Joe Kenneally from Kilshanny before the meal began. Joe is 90 years old, give or take a month, and he told me great folkloric yarns about Kilshanny and Ennistymon as we watched the photographer at work on the lawn below.

They were great yarns. I'm going up to Kilshanny to visit himself and Mary, his wife of 68 years, before the summer is out.

We have no real comfort talking because the photographer is constantly ordering us to get into photos and to get out of them. "An old man's head has more riches within," says Davy Martin, "than the Bank of England."

We take the long way home next afternoon, calling into the Bellsbridge House Hotel at scenic Spanish Point for a coffee in the early afternoon, and dammit if we don't encounter another wedding. The bride and her party had stayed in the hotel overnight and appeared fully dressed in the lobby as we drank our coffee.

The bride was no girl at all. She was a large and mature blonde woman at least in her forties. She was made very beautiful by the undiluted joy on her face.

She was going to the chapel, I'd say, for the second time because one of the bridesmaids looked exactly like her daughter. A bright little dark woman was fluttering around them all dishing out flowers and bouquets.

I thought I was probably seeing my first wedding planner, so total was her commitment as the bridal party was beflowered and left the hotel in a vintage car.

The little woman and her assistant then set themselves down in the bar behind plates of bacon and cabbage. I was bold enough to ask her if indeed I was seeing a wedding planner in action.

No, she said, she was the florist for the wedding. The bride had come over from America for her wedding and so she'd come to the hotel to distribute the flowers.

Her assistant handed me a business card which revealed she was Brid Coonan T.H. Dip. She's good at what she does I think.

Outside, by the cliff road, a bronzed walker with a pronounced limp and big boots, German I'd say, strode past the Bellsbridge with his pack on his back and not a bother on him. "That bird," Davy Martin would say, "was well fit to fly on one wing."

The midsummer meanderings had taken us to McDermott's Pub in Doolin earlier in the week. There was a great session in the bar and a good crowd which was about 50-50 between locals and visitors.

Leader of the quartet belting out the music and songs from the stage was the Dublin flute player Peader Reilly, the only man in the world who can play the flute and utter them yippy cheers which punctuate sessions at one and the same time. A remarkable gift and he was a good singer too. It made a rousing night.

We met a man called Bannon who knows the woman in Waterford from whom we are soon collecting our new retriever pup, already christened Anika by the Dutch nation.

"My mother was a Bannon too," I tell him. We agree that the clan has a history of seafaring and joining foreign armies. "Families like the Bannons," Davy Martin would say, "are fodder for cannons."

Last night - the Dutch Nation abed after a long shift - I dropped down late to the Honk, as much for the chat as for a solitary pint of Guinness. My Limerick-born neighbor Jimmy White was there wearing a huge smile and a green Limerick jersey. This was because after an epic struggle involving three games with extra time, Limerick eventually defeated Tipperary to qualify to meet Waterford in the Munster hurling final.

Limerick have not won a championship clash for years. Men were saying to Jimmy they had never before seen him wearing a smile and a Limerick jersey at the same time! He did not care at all, the smile only got wider.

The other line of chat which I found remarkable altogether was that one man produced a paper which reported that Ireland is now importing priests rather than exporting them to the Foreign Missions like we always did before. Twenty Polish priests have just arrived in the country to minister to the 100,000 Poles now living and working here. That was a greater number, reported the newspaper, than the total number of priests ordained in Ireland last year.

And the last strand of the gossip was the fact that at the Salthill Air Show hours earlier a door dropped off a hovering RAF helicopter and smashed down on to the prom injuring three people, at least one of them a Pole. And it happened on the eve of the British Army's final withdrawal from South Armagh.

"It might have been," as Davy Martin would say, "the last sting of a dyin' wasp."