WE call the little stream that runs alongside our garden Abhainn Éasca because one day, some years ago, I turned over a stone and found a twelve-inch long black eel.

AFTER the dry weeks it’s suddenly the rainy season.

LAST week the first storm of winter in this part of the world, with the huge gunnera leaves in the garden almost flying off their stalks – they need controlling anyway – and things going bang in the night.

WHEN the sun came out, half a dozen butterflies fluttered in the garden.

Dreoilín, dreoilín where is your nest?

IT’S amazing how smaltz songs can contain memorable lines, phrases that never leave one, no matter how saccharine or sentimental.

LAST week, in glorious weather, we walked the headlands of west Cork. On Three Castles Head, beyond Barley Cove, we found lizards basking on the walls of the collapsed 15th century bawn, golden lizards, sharp-eyed and fast, disappearing between the stones at the hint of a footfall or shadow.

A LOVELY morning to wake to – for a change. Outside, the sun is lighting the garden like a stage set.

THE other evening, venturing forth after the deluges, I walked out of a meadow into the half-darkness of an old beech wood.

MACKEREL galore again this year and our eastern European migrant workers are gobsmacked at the fecundity of the local seas as they reel them in off the pier and off the rocks without even the need of a boat to go after them.