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.

WHEN the sun shines, the buddleia bush in the garden is a dazzling kaleidoscope of colour with half a dozen varieties of butterflies coming and going to the purple flowers.

Twenty-five degrees, read the dashboard thermometer as we drove west out of the city – what a day, of all days in this dysfunctional summer, to have had to spend indoors.

THE bounty of the mackerel arrived off the coast this summer, as every summer, and were shoaling in the bay during the Women’s Angling Competition at the Courtmacsherry Festival last week.

EARWIGS are not popular insects.

THREE cheers for the farmer I saw pulling ragwort in a sloping field, just south-west of Bandon.