By Cormac MacConnell

THE golden summer peaks, turns subtly, the sweetest of the two apple trees in my garden suddenly spills down the red-cheeked apples of the sun that is suddenly not so hot.

I get an invitation to the opening of the Merriman Summer School in Lisdoonvarna later this month by Sean Kelly, former GAA president. That’s a significant invitation because the annual Merriman Summer School marks the end of summer, really, and the start of the mists and the frosts and the tintings of the onrushing ember days.

I’m so reluctant to see the end of this jauntiest of summers that I’m flying all over the place, from Baltimore away down in West Cork, to Bundoran above in Donegal, squeezing the last out of it.

In Listowel the other evening I relished a night in John B. Keane’s with my brother Mickie and sister-in-law Maura and savored the seamless transition which Billie, witty son of the playwright, now the boss, has achieved with his formidable mother Mary. It’s as good as ever it was and that’s special.

Billy tells me the great yarn about the two Russian KGB men in the Stalinist era in Moscow who hailed from the same kind of country town as Listowel, had gone to school together, were always friends, and who were both as cute as mountain foxes. At that time all agents had to meet a monthly quota of captures of felons against the state, and this was a tough month.

Boris and Ivan went out for a glass of vodka. Eventually Boris says to Ivan, “Tell me truthfully, Ivan, what you really think about our government?” And crafty Ivan answers, “Boris, I think exactly the same about them as you do.”

And there is a short silence before Boris says, “In that case Ivan I’m afraid I’ll have to arrest you!”

We have a great evening. Billie comes home with us after closing time and we observe the dawn over the drained mouths of several bottles of wine before it finishes.

I hit the road back to Clare sometime the next evening. Thistledown is already drifting across the roads, another sign of the turning of the summer.

First thistledown I saw, a week earlier was on the road between Ballyshannon and Bundoran in Donegal of the tongue-twang craic. It was the resort we were brought to as children.

Every time I see its strand, and walk it, out towards Rogey Rock, I’m suddenly nine years old again, sand between my toes, and amazed and goggle-eyed at the big dogfish trapped in a tidal pool below the rock, threshing its tail against the world, frightening every child on the beach.

I meet a man I was at school with on the prom and we have a coffee together in the brash little resort with the most predatory one-armed bandits in Ireland and brined atmosphere of fun. He still comes down every year for a week, he says, never missed even one year. And his grown family comes, too.

One of the sons has a mobile home which they all use. He says hardly anything has changed at all over the years. I look around sharply and have to agree.

I go into the American House store before I leave. The beach balls and sand shovels and buckets are in the same place they always were, the postcard stand, the row of provincial papers from all over Ireland for the visitors.

Even the pretty schoolgirl who sells me my cigarettes and newspaper looks exactly like the schoolgirl with the holiday job who was there when I was fifteen and smitten with her, and too shy to do anything about it.

I see more policemen around Bundoran than I saw during the entire fortnight I spent earlier in Enniskillen on the other side of the border. Bundoran, with a Republican strand in it, always had a little bit the whiff of cordite too.

In the strolling holidaymakers in shorts and sandals you more than rarely could see hard-faced men standing at the doors of pubs, smoking, like troops from the front, enjoying a bit of R&R but never really switched off, always watchful.

I stop by the side of Yeats’ grave on my way back down South. Cast a cold eye. The grave is minutes away as the crow flies from castled Mullaghmore on the coast where hard-eyed men detonated the boat bomb that killed Lord Mountbatten of Burma twenty years ago.

On this day in Mullaghmore the children on the beach are gathered around a tidal pool, high with excitement. They are too far away for me to see clearly but I’m sure there was a mackerel or dogfish trapped in there.

Away deep south, another evening, the amazing village of Baltimore basks in the evening sun. At the end of the street overlooking the crammed pier there are so many outside tables beneath the old castle that it all looks like a relaxed café.

There is not a vacant chair around those tables, laden with pizzas and today’s special and glasses of red wine. All the nations of the world are here, but the prevailing accent is the different twang of the West Corkonians, timbre’d near enough to the Ulster frequency but also so very different.

Sitting there I thought how amazing it is that such a small island as this, only a few hours drive from tip to tip, can produce such a wide range of different accents. It’s quite incredible.

And they are so pronounced when you know them that a man or woman has only to open their mouth and speak a sentence or two and you know instantly which provincial paper he would be buying on holidays in the American House in Bundoran.

At Poulnabrone again, atop the Burren in Clare, twice in near succession, showing it off to visitors, I learn from a local man something I was very hazy about on the earlier visit when somebody was garnishing history with fable.

It seems that the Neolithic bodies beneath the great capstone of the famous dolmen were of men and women and children, including a newborn babe. And they came from a harsh time indeed.

Only one man had reached the age of forty. The majority were in their twenties and thirties. Already they were arthritic from hard work.

They fought a lot too. One skull was fractured. Ribs were broken. And one man died from an arrow wound to the hip.

Their summers, surely, were so short and so few. Not so often did they live to see the apples falling, to watch the drifting thistledown of the approaching ember days.

The thought is enough to make one decide not to waste any summer days at all along this west coast, to go to bed very late for as long as it lasts, to enjoy it all.

I’m off to Galway now.