So Peter made me tea again. He had some nice chocolate biscuits. He had a sweet tooth for the bikkies, he said, sure it could be worse. I asked him about his books. They were two kinds, he said: books in Irish and westerns. I could see he was reading one called Kill Dusty Fog. He said the western was dead as a doornail, you could not buy one now, the last one he bought was one called Brokeback Mountain, somebody told him it was about cowboys, but it was useless, it was written by a woman of course, and women could not do westerns whatever else they could do, so he just read the old ones over and over again, the funny thing was he could never recall the endings until he got to the end, but he had a good idea who would live and who would die, that’s the important thing, there’s nothing worse than the hero dying, it’s very hard altogether, but if you knew it was going to happen you could be prepared for it, then it wasn’t so bad. And what about the Irish books? They were his mother’s, she was a school teacher back in Bolus, it was the old National School, she was a native Irish speaker and he grew up with it himself, his favourite book of all was Dánta Ghrádha collected by Thomas F. O’Rahilly with a foreword by Robin Flower, they were all in the old Irish of course, you’d have to work hard to understand that kind of thing, but what else would he be doing? and it was interesting to see how those old people managed the courting business, it was very intricate altogether and they had beautiful words like rún and searc, we don’t have at all in the English the like of it, it was not like nowadays when you could go on the internet and buy a wife from Latvia, he knew a man who bought his from there, if you could believe it, and it worked out well enough too, although she was thirty years his junior, he left her a fine house and a Ford Focus, it was a B&B now, the Latvians are hard workers, in his father’s time there was matchmaking of course, and in a way that was the internet for them, you would put out word that you were wanting a wife and a wife would be found and if the two of you agreed well enough that was the match made, it was better than the lonesomeness anyway, and his own mother used to say even if you had an old dog around the house you’d get fond of him after a while, which was not a bad saying for it worked both ways, the man for the woman and the woman for the man, the women were masters of the house anyway, so it was more important for the man to get on with the woman or he would get thin gruel morning, noon and night, a bitter woman in the house was the worst thing of all, even a bitter man wasn’t as bad for he was out of the house from the dawn with work to do, but a bitter woman soured everything, they had their ways, of course, and the man could go rambling at night-time, he would go card-playing or dancing from house to house, a man with a good voice was always welcome for they were mighty people for songs, if you could sing and you knew a share of songs there would always be a welcome, and if there was a welcome there would be drink, many a man was turned into a raving alcoholic by night-rambling, even men that started out sober young fellows, by the end of it they would be a pity.