I went to Schull for the drive. That’s all it was – a Tuesday in October with nothing pressing, the sky doing that pale bright thing it does when rain is still an hour away, and the Yaris needing a run after sitting on the lane all week.

Schull is a long way for a Tuesday. Down through Cork city and west from there, the roads getting narrower the further out you go, hedges higher, until you’re not sure you’d get past another car if one came, and then the village opens out and there’s the harbour, and it’s all grand. It took me the better part of the morning. I didn’t mind.

The rain arrived while I was parking. Properly arrived – not a soft day, not a mist, but the real thing, horizontal and purposeful, the way Cork rain seems to mean it more than Kerry rain. I had no umbrella because I never have an umbrella. I put up my collar, which does nothing, and walked quickly in the direction of nowhere in particular until I found myself in a secondhand bookshop on a narrow street just off the main one.

I was in there a good while. The woman behind the counter said nothing to me and I said nothing to her and that suited us both. The shelves were the kind that have clearly been added to without any plan for thirty years, so you’d find local history next to crime fiction next to a 1987 guide to Portuguese wine. I like that. I like not knowing what I’m going to find.

What I found was a battered paperback of ‘Ordinary Water’ – a novel I’d never heard of, by a woman whose name I didn’t recognise, published by a small press in 2003 and seemingly not much mentioned since. The cover was plain. I read the first paragraph standing in the aisle and then read it again. I brought it to the counter with two euro fifty and the woman put it in a bag without looking at it.

I sat in the car for a while before driving home, rain on the windscreen, eating a sandwich I’d brought from home, reading the first chapter. The light was already going by the time I started the engine, which at this point in October – and I said as much to Donal when he rang on Sunday – means you’ve lost the afternoon before you’ve properly decided what to do with it.

I’d been thinking, on the drive down, about the garden and all the cutting back still to do. The fuchsia is dealt with, finally – I wrote about that last week – but there’s a whole side of the stone wall that has its own ideas and I’ve been ignoring it since September. I didn’t think about it once I was in the bookshop. I didn’t think about it in the car either.

I’m about two-thirds through the novel now. It’s quiet and precise, the kind of book where not very much happens but you keep reading because something in the sentences is pulling you forward. I won’t say more than that. I’m not sure I have words for it yet.

The receipt is still in the bag, folded in half on the kitchen press where I leave things I mean to do something with.