Fish & Tips

Friday mornings, I go shopping with my mother, whether this is an ordeal or a pleasure I have never quite decided. The ordeal begins, oops. Anyway, before the shopping can begin, the wheelchair parking badge must be removed from my mother’s car and displayed in mine. This badge warrants a blog of its own, let’s just say that at 93 years of age my mother has finally been granted a wheelchair parking permit. The downside to this is that, although there may be many car parking spaces available in the car park, I must take on Friday’s inevitably chaotic traffic and do a drive by of the wheelchair parking spaces close to the supermarket’s entrance. Only after we are certain that they are full, and that nobody is leaving any time soon, am I allowed to park elsewhere.

We don’t shop in one of the multiples, but the store is relatively large, well-stocked, and the staff are pleasant. One advantage of the store is that there are more than a few grey-haired clients who are all as regular as my mother in visiting it on a Friday. This means that it can take some time to get around the supermarket, no matter how small our shop. There are many hellos to be made, inquiries about hips and cataracts to be satisfied and news of funerals missed and discussions about mass cards to be sent. Some people may call this gossip, however, for me, gossip always entails the invention of salacious facts, so I just think of this as a community news event. After topping-up on the news front, we head to the farmers’ market, which is only about 500 yards away, though this involves a drive past another couple of occupied, wheelchair parking spaces. The market is hidden as far away from the public as the County Council could make it, without taking steps to ban it outright. And it varies in size, depending on the season and the weather, but you can always rely on at least seven regular stallholders being in attendance.

The irregulars may very well sell the best homemade chocolates around, but they tend to be fair weather hawkers. There are experienced knick-knack sellers who occasionally turn up, but the County Council site does not offer the exposure they need, the footfall required, to make a profit, so they quickly depart to busier pastures. This footfall issue is a pity, because local would-be entrepreneurs open and close-up-shop on a regular basis, never getting a real chance to properly test their stall’s full potential. Meanwhile, some people do surprisingly well. All last summer we had an exotic regular, a poet selling his wares, three books of his own poems, but he disappeared for the winter, presumably there is only so much suffering a poet should have to undergo for his art.

Of the regular stalls, three offer homemade baking, jams, honey, and eggs. There is a cheese stall too, where many of the cheeses are made by the stall’s owner. There are also two vegetable stalls, one primarily selling homegrown vegetables, direct from the stall owner’s land. But for the purposes of this blog today, I’m going to concentrate on the fish van.

Jason is known far-and-wide (according to himself,) as the Fish & Tip man. Though, in reality, he should be known as the Fish & Banter Man because, as well as trucking in fresh fish from Wexford every Friday, he always has an endless supply of chat, cooking advice, and jokes at the ready for customers. For many, he is the market’s main attraction. And many of those would never be caught dead in a betting shop. Jason, you see, is a passionate horseman, and like all passionate people, he loves to spread the news.

His stall is our first stop every week. We may need bread, or jam, or honey, but not until we have secured our bet for the day.  Even if there is a queue ahead of us, we get in line. My mother invariably rumbles through her bag to find her notebook well before we reach the counter. There may be the name of a book, here or there among its tiny pages, perhaps even a telephone number, but a quick flick through it would make you think it is the form page from a newspaper. There are times noted, venues recorded, and the most exotic of equine names carefully written down in my mother’s elegant hand. The odds are never noted, starting prices only come into play later. Many of these horses proved to be also rans, but the winning side of the ledger favors my mother.  Ma has pen in hand and notebook at the ready by the time the man ahead of us has bought a lobster, filled a bag full of prawns and has decided between the salmon and the hake. Then it is our turn.

“I have one for you today,” Jason normally says to my mother, before turning to me and asking what fish we want. Once I have given him my order and he is fulfilling it, he talks to my mother, takes out his phone, calls out the name of a racecourse, the race time, and the horse’s name.

The people around us normally are intrigued by the events unfolding before them. Some see my mother and smile, thinking poor, wee, lost, old woman. Some frown, wondering what they’re missing out on. An old friend, who was behind my mother last week, asked her to place a tenner each way on the tip of the day. Sometimes, you can even see a person’s lips move as they try to remember the name of the horse, intending, no doubt, to check it out later.

The funny thing is that my mother is still on the winning side of the Ledger this year. But the horse from the week before last was not even placed. This may be the reason why Jason felt a little bit shy about offering my mother a tip on Friday morning. However, he was determined to do well by her, and asked her to text him later, he most certainly would have a winner today. I entered his telephone number into my mother’s phone, texted him using her name, asking him for her tip for the week. The horse won. It makes up for the winner we missed out on, on Good Friday. The tip was good, you understand, but the bookie was closed. Still, the fish was delicious.

Jason texted us the good news last Friday, confirming the win only minutes after the race was run. Now, that is some service. And the winnings more that covered the price of the hake, the monkfish and even the bag of crabmeat we bought.