I go downstairs and I watch television. It is about time now for The Week in Politics. When it starts I’m watching it and I’m not watching it. There is no real distinction between the two acts. I am in a political trance. I grab a beer, a can of Pražský which I notice has now become my mainstay beer, when did this happen? I look at the photograph again. The beer goes down my throat quickly but beer can do that sometimes. I take a second can from the fridge and go back to the sofa. I get up and take the photograph from the wall and I sit back down. The cottage we rented was close to the beach. We couldn’t actually see it from the cottage but that didn’t matter to us then for we could smell the Atlantic and we could hear it and we could feel the mist on our skin. It was like satin.

The mussels that we collected and I ate, and the chowder that we gorged in bars alongside the single pint of Guinness. You only need the one in Connemara. I don’t recall the black stuff ever having tasted so sweet, so sweet the froth on your lips. I remember the children’s delight at being allowed to dip their fingers in to taste it. I remember laughing at the facial contortions they made as the sweetness became bitterness to their childish palates. Their delight with their little bags of Bacon Fries and Scampi Fries and their Cokes, in the pub. I remember that I asked the barman for bitter lemon but he didn’t stock it and instead I bought a couple of cans of Fanta Lemon and I showed the children how to mix the minerals, like I used to do as a child when I was on holiday in Ireland: two parts Coke to one part lemon. Bitter lemon is in my opinion far superior to Fanta and somehow I am happy that I kept that thought to myself and didn’t even allude to it, in fact.

It is still with me, the sand on the bay, soft like Spanish sand or Brittas Bay sand but far removed from the grainy compacted strip offered on Killiney beach that I run on in the evenings during the winter and early in the mornings on work days. I am careful not to move beyond the strip where the stones are scattered all along the rest of the beach right up until the wooden fence.

And I think about rhyme and the importance the children place on it.

50. What Am I Doing?