I drove to Kenmare on a Wednesday because I’d run out of stamps and because I wanted to, and those two reasons together felt sufficient.

The road from the north was wet – not dramatically wet, just that steady October grey that settles in and doesn’t announce itself. Windscreen wipers on the slow setting all the way down. The Yaris was making the noise it makes on long descents, the faint moan from somewhere under the dashboard that I’ve been ignoring since spring. I turned the radio up a little.

Kenmare was busy in the way a small town can be busy on a midweek morning in autumn – not many tourists, but plenty of people going about things, cars parked at odd angles, someone’s dog sitting outside the chemist with the patience of a saint. The post office had a queue, which surprised me. I stood in it with my little bundle of envelopes and thought about nothing in particular, which is one of the better things a queue can offer you.

Afterwards I wanted tea but the café I went into had a good smell off it – something being baked, and warm – and I ordered a coffee instead. Out in the world I weaken sometimes. At home it’s Barry’s, no question. It was grand. I sat near the window and watched the street for a while. A woman across the way was wrestling with an umbrella that had gone inside out, the spokes all wrong, and she had the look of someone who had already had enough of the day. I felt for her.

I’d meant to go straight home after, but I walked down towards the water instead. The Kenmare River, which is really a bay, wide and grey-green on a day like that, had a low cloud sitting over it, the far mountains showing only their bottom halves. There’s something in that particular kind of visibility, where you know the mountain is there because you’ve seen it before, and you piece together the rest of it from memory. I stood for a few minutes looking out and got fairly damp for the trouble.

On the way back through the town I passed a shop with some winter coats in the window, and I thought about going in, and didn’t. I’ve been thinking that about coats for two or three years now. At some point I’ll do it and that’ll be that.

I was home by half two. The fuchsia at the side of the path, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago and really did mean to cut back, had water all along its branches and was dripping steadily onto the step. I ducked under it and got my key in the door and the fire was gone to ash.

The stamps are on the kitchen windowsill. I keep forgetting to post the letters.