FIRST MORNING back from the ever-lovely island of La Gomera, in the Canaries, and it’s porridge with figs for breakfast; fresh figs purloined from a roadside tree as we drove across the island to catch the boat to Tenerife for our flight home.

TWO recent news items put me in mind of a book I read some years ago called In the Heart of The Sea.

OVER the small stream that borders our garden, the last purple cascades of buddleia are still laden with butterflies.

RAIN has been sparse and sporadic. On the country lanes, the hart’s tongue ferns are half dead.

ON bank-holiday Monday, a local songwriter/musician phoned me to say that the click-click of the gorse pods popping in the heat were like maracas in a salsa band, and that kissing was finally out of season in west Cork.

LIKE polished silver, gold, blue-green, iridescent, they lie, headless on a platter, the wonderful bounty of the sea.

I WOULD love to put a stopwatch on a sandhopper, the half-inch long, pearly crustacean found foraging amongst the washed-up seaweed on our beaches. If one could harness the energy of the billions found amongst the sea wrack, one could fuel half the country’s JCBs.

FRIDAY, Saturday and Sunday, July 14 to 18, was the best weekend for horse-racing on the sandbanks or lazing on the beach for this or many a year.

WHEN we take the visiting grandchildren mackerel fishing in the summer, one of the highlights is always the big seals drawn up on the rock island at the mouth of the bay, or treading water in the sea around it, immersed up to their nostrils like Japanese men simmering in Tokyo public baths.

WEIRD WEATHER, last week. After seven or so weeks of almost constant sunshine and skies as peerless blue as Andalucia, suddenly the light was grey, the air was dead and a prickly, humid heat enveloped us.