There was another red sky this morning but there is no photo and still no snow. But it is cold clear and bright and I have been outside inspecting drains. The sink in the kitchen was full of greasy cold water that was not draining away. I bailed some out and spent fifteen minutes at it with a plunger but it was old and the wrong size although I was able to loosen some black gunk from under the plug the blockage was not moving.

So Galen and I went outside with a screwdriver and torch to lift the drain cover. There was nearly an accident as Galen was too busy practising kung fu moves in the dark to notice that the drain cover was up. Inside it was as clean as a whistle so I was going to have to try something more drastic. I fortified myself with 20 minutes of David Attenborough. Lots of nice music and pictures but I am damn sure that some years ago there was an almost identical programme on the Congo which featured the same elephants and their watering hole.

Cautiously I opened our readers Digest book on DIY. That told me to use the plunger. Done that. It didn’t work. The next step was to go under the sink and start unscrewing things with buckets to hand to catch the water. I peered under the sink and amongst the plastic pipes it looked as if there were things to unscrew but precious little room for a bucket. I improvised with a small saucepan starting with what I thought was the most innocuous looking thing to unscrew. I started on it and after a while a small drip of water started to leak out. I fully expecting this to turn into a great gush but nothing else happened. The screw was undone and in my hand and that came out was a small drip.

I could see that potentially this was going to take a while. I then remembered the pot of caustic soda hidden behind a shelf in the basement. I knew that it was bad stuff. But if it was bad stuff it might even work.

I worked my way through the child safety features and poured some of the granules down the plug hole. There was a slight fizz and a pop and the scud of water that was left in the bottom of the sink disappeared. Caustic soda is very scary stuff. I put it back in the basement feeling slightly guilty. There had been more things i could have unscrewed under the sink. Next time perhaps.

No cooking for me this evening but I ate a very good cheese souffle and I have taken the oxtails I bought at the farmers market out of the freezer to cook tomorrow night and eat on Friday.

In the meantime I have picked up again Stephen Lockwood’s book The Mackerel Its biology, assessment and the management of a fishery.

It is one of the few books on mackerel I have been able to find. Published in 1988 it provides a useful bit of background reading on the mackerel fisheries and some of their history around the British Isles. He says  that mackerel sized between 30 and 35 cm will produce between 255,000 and 405,000 eggs. Although some 99.9999% of the mackerel born from these eggs will not reached their first birthday some 3,000 million mackerel will join the stocks of mackerel each year.

He also describes a shoal of mackerel caught on sonar in 1974 off Cornwall which was up to five miles long, two miles wide and some 40 metres deep. It all boils down to a lot of mackerel. When you have that many fish coursing through the water I wonder that it doesn’t cause some kind of strange disturbance or wave on the surface.

There was a red sky this morning that flared through the black silhouette of the trees on the other side of the road. There was only a brief few seconds to admire it between opening the curtains having got dressed and going downstairs to get into the car and off to work.

By the time we had got to the flyover leading from Birkenhead to the tunnel entrance the bright flare of pink had diminished to a pale orange cloud that balled up over the sheds of Cammell Laird. Despite the warning no bad came of the day and the skies remained dry and clear although a bitter cold took hold in the early evening.

This evening I helped with the cooking and made a pesto sauce to go with half inch cubes of potato roasted in oil until crisp and pasta cooked for its last fee minutes with half a shredded cabbage. I made the pesto in the heavy stone pestle and mortar; crushing the garlic with rock salt to a paste followed by the handfuls of basil leaves and pine nuts. Once that was thick slurry I poured in olive oil to loosen and then thickened it up again with parmesan.

After an afternoon being told how to sell myself there was some satisfaction to be had in pounding the sauce together.

This kids all complained it tasted too sharply of garlic. No doubt we will all smell tomorrow.

Some of you may have noticed that the attic has had a number of mentions over the course of the last few weeks. This is mostly in association with me bringing down some obscure record that has not been listened to for years and deserves another airing (see Radar Bros from last night’s post). The reason for more trips than usual to the attic is that we have started, slowly, on some tidying up.

A big house is good in theory but when you are hoarder of rubbish like me it means that every spare corner soon gets filled with something else that cannot be thrown away. Tucked away in the further reaches of the attic it is possible to find boxes that remain almost untouched from when we moved into the house almost thirteen years ago. It has also become the repository for all my old records, both those I have bought and those I have inherited from various friend and family which is how I managed to end up with two copies of Phil Collins’ Face Value!

In another post I will set out a list of the various record shops down the years from where most of the records got bought. In the meantime it is probably right to say that good number got bought in Probe at the various locations they have been in round Liverpool starting with the shop down Matthew Street where Pete Burns used to work.

Anyway Galen has decided that at the age of 15 he requires a bachelor pad and he has identified that the attic provides the best location for this so as some sort of payback for him sawing some logs yesterday we have started on the process of tidying up. This meant that a couple of hours were spent yesterday afternoon putting records in alphabetical order and putting into date order the 213 copies of MOJO magazine going back to November 1993.

I haven’t started yet on the NME’s. There are fifteen years or so worth of those including a collection going back to the early 1980’s. If I started on them I could be lost for days. I am sure that I will get round to re-reading them all.

Of course a fair number of the records will have been bought in a branch of HMV and I have just seen the news that they are about to go into administration which means I am going to have to find something else to do in my lunchtimes and who knows I might even start talking to the staff in Probe.

No cooking this evening apart from the reheating of last nights supper. It was just as good second time round.