Shanghai visitors savour Sherkin

SHANGHAI to Sherkin, a contrast that would make one’s head spin.

However, the 20 Chinese medical and food-science students who recently visited Sherkin Island in west Cork’s Roaring Water Bay kept their heads fixed firmly on their shoulders and earnestly absorbed all that was presented in terms of magnificent scenery, Irish welcome and thrilling music during their stay.

Professor Pat Wall, until recently chief executive of the Irish Food Safety Authority and chair of the European Food Safety Authority – and now teaching and researching at UCD – conducted the group around, a hands-across-the-ocean gesture. They stayed at The Sherkin Island Hostel where they enjoyed barbecues of freshly-caught mackerel and sesiúns of Irish music at night. All but two of the visitors were girls and all spoke English well.

After politely listening to my imaginative preamble about the local O’Driscoll chieftains and their castles – delivered as we toured the bay on the Sherkin Islands Ferry – they asked me about the scores of gannets, guillemots and cormorants harvesting the mackerel and sprat shoals which we could see breaking the surface now and then.

They told me that cormorants are still employed as fish catchers on the River Li, parts of which are familiar subjects of Chinese landscape art. We have all seen the paintings of solitary towers of karst rising hundreds of feet out of the water, all decorated with gnarled trees so aesthetically sited that they might have been arranged by the painters who have traditionally made a living from depicting them. I would like to go there one day.

After the voyage we repaired to the Islander’s Rest for excellent refreshments. Later, sitting around the honky-tonk piano at the Jolly Roger pub, we discovered that three of the visitors were fine pianists, entertaining us with everything from high falutin’ Chopin to low-falutin’ honky-tonk.

It was coincidental that they all came from Shanghai. Weeks before, as I walked the cliffs of Cape Clear Island my phone rang and it turned out to be my brother, Gerry, calling me from Shanghai. He was there to organise hospitality at the Latvian Pavilion at the World Expo, four square kilometres of exhibitions mounted by almost every country on earth with 400,000 visitors daily.

The centrepiece of the pavilion is a glass wind tunnel. At what should certainly be called The High Flyers Bar, streams of air lift one bodily off the ground and waft one about, drink in hand, high above terra firma. The intrepid flyer can even be levitated through an area of open roof and, in suspension, gaze down upon the carpet of lighted pavilions stretching away below. I’m not sure if my brother tried this, but the Shanghai experience was a change from Spain, where his centre-city pubs and a farm in Andalucía occupies him.

This year, the farm suffered heavy losses in its speciality, early peaches. The raison d’être of the farm is to produce the first European peaches to go on supermarket shelves each year. Timing is vital. An expert judges on which day, precisely, the peaches will be at that critical stage of ripeness to reach the shops in peak condition. Brigades of pickers are contracted to arrive that morning; wholesalers trucks stand by.

At this stage, the crop will already have survived many hazards – falls of hailstones can render the fruit unsaleable, while moulds, leaf blight and various pests do the same. This year, however, all appeared to be perfect. The expert examined the fruit and declared that it would be in prime condition for picking two days later. However, suddenly, daytime temperatures in Andalucía soared, followed by nights of torrid heat and a full moon. The peaches ripened by moonlight – and at a gallop. Two days later, most were soft, over-ripe and beyond reclaim.

Of 70,000 kilos picked, only 20,000 were saleable. My brother is fed up with peaches. Only two years ago he had 18 hectares of old trees replaced with new, at high cost: and, of course, the trees that grew the duff crop had all been pruned twice. He will keep the nectarines and olives on the farm, and replace the peaches with almonds. Almonds keep and do not ripen by the light of the moon.