You could be sat in the pub on a sunny day in summer and a hire car will pull slowly up the small hill from the Cottage. The driver and the passengers all looking left at the view over the pier and the boats in Kitchen Cove. The car pulls up outside the pub and the driver gets out. As he does so he pauses and looks back and is obviously talking into the car. Once he is out he casts an eye over the wooden tables and benches on the patch of grass across the road that leads down to the water opposite the pier. He turns back to say something else into the car, straightens up and walks into the pub.

The door is open for the heat. Once the man is inside, he slows and looks around nervously. There is only me and the man with a black beard stood at the bar. We have not been talking, just drinking our pints in the quiet. Mary is out the back somewhere.

The man looks at us and says ‘Hello’. There is an accent to it but difficult to place. He walks up the bar and stands there straight but looking it over.

‘She’ll be out in a while’ says the man with a black beard.

The man who has walked in must be in his late fifties. He has grey hair and is tall and is wearing clean white clothes. ‘Do they make coffee here or some food?’ he asks. He has a Dutch accent.

The man with a black beard looks at him and shakes his head ‘You’ll not get that here’ he says, ‘It’ll be too much work. But you drive on to Kilcrohane, its a few miles along the road and Eileen she might make you a sandwich.’

The man looks puzzled ‘Eileen, who is that?’

‘Eileen, she has the pub in Kilcrohane, Fitzpatricks its there on hill up from the church. You will see it if you drive. But if you want a drink, a cold drink, well there is plenty here.’ The man with a black beard lifts up his pint and drinks at it quietly. ‘Mary’ he shouts ‘Mary there is a man here may want a drink.’

The man looks surprised at the noise. He looks out at the car and shakes his head at the three faces looking out.

Mary comes out from the green door behind the bar that leads into her kitchen. The man looks pleased to see her and repeats his question about food and some coffee. Mary shakes her head ‘No it is too late for that. We used to do coffee and I used to make sandwiches but we stopped that some time back. If you want a drink we have that and there is packets of Tayto’s if you want them and there is two packet of bacon fries we have left.’

‘Thank you’ the man says ‘A minute please’. He goes back outside to the car and puts his head through the open door. He is out there for a few minutes before the other doors open. Another man of similar age gets out of the passenger door and two women get out of the back. The three who have just got out of the car cross over the road and sit down on one of the benches. One of the women has a camera and she takes some photos of the view across the bay.

The same man comes back into the pub. He asks Mary for half a pint of Guinness and three glasses of Coke.

As Mary pours the drinks I ask him ‘Do you know where you are going, going onto from here?’

“No’ he says. ‘We have come from Cork and are driving to Bantry, to go to the House, but we drove here to see the water and we kept on driving, a little too far I think.’ He smiles sadly at that.

“Well if you have driven this far you can drive to the end’, I tell him, ‘To the end of the Sheep’s Head. It is another 25 minutes or so and when you get there you can walk down to the lighthouse. On a day like today it will be worth it. Have you a map and I’ll show you.’

He goes to the car again and takes out his map and I show him the road that will take him to the head of the peninsula and how he can cut back along the quiet road on the north side that will take them back to Bantry. Mary gives him a tray for his drinks and as he takes them outside he says “Thank you’.

It was quiet again for a while in the pub. Mary pours us two more pints and goes back into her kitchen.

‘It’s the end there, the tip, that is the Sheep’s Head’ said the man with a black beard. ‘You look on a map and it will have written down the middle of this spit of land The Sheep’s Head Peninsula. Well it is not. The Sheep’s Head is the last few hundred yards before it drops off into the sea. All the rest of it is Muintir Bhaire and you will see that on some of the signs but Sheep’s Head is easier to say. I ask you what is there here to be naming it Sheep’s Head after it.’

Out side the four visitors finish their drinks. They leave their glasses on the table and get back in the car. They drive back they way they came ignoring the suggestion to carry on up to the head of the peninsula.

A day off during half term and we were determined to get fresh air and to stretch our legs. A couple of years ago we had celebrated a birthday in Oswestry and spent a Friday afternoon driving out to the waterfall at Pistyll Rhaeadr for a scrabble over the rocks around the the waterfall.I had not really paid much attention. At the time I hadn’t paid much attention to where we were and how we got there. But two years later with kids in need of a run out it seemed like a good idea to go back.

A quick trawl through Google gave us all the information we needed. Rather to my surprise we all managed to get of bed on time this morning and we were off just after 9.00am. We almost bagged ourselves some lunch on the way down. We were halfway down the A483 when a cock pheasant in full plumage tried to cross the road two or three hundred yards ahead of us. There was a car between us and the pheasant and there was a bit of dithering from both the car and the pheasant as to where they should go. Sadly for the pheasant the car driver was not going to sacrifice herself and even more sadly the pheasant having turned back hesitated and turned again and was clipped by the car and was bowled over in a burst of feathers.

It looked in reasonable nick as we bowled past but there was a howl of protest when I suggested I should stop to dispatch it and bring it home for supper. So we continued the drive.

As we turned off the mail road beyond Oswestry and head into the low lying mountains a mist descended. It was more like low cloud. Not rain as such but laying a cold layer of damp over everything. It got denser as we drove up the narrow track through the valley that eventually lead to Pistyll Rhaeadr. By the time we got there the air was thick with it. We could hardly see the top of the waterfall. Just a gush of grey movement through the air and the noise of it coming down. As we walked closer and onto the metal bridge at the bottom we got a better idea of the size of it, 240 feet from top to bottom, taller than Niagara Falls and the tallest waterfall in England and Wales. Looking up we could see the white water spuming over the lip and a small arch that had been created in the black rock.

We did the scramble up to the top of the falls with a vague intention of eating our picnic up there. It was steep and wet and the youngest child started to complain but we we made it to the top. Once we got to the top of the falls we wandered around the rocks. The ground was deceptively marshy a pile of leaves or area of grass would sink down six or seven inches covering our walking boots. Some of the mud went deeper and Cora managed to lose her balance and went down face first arms in the air into a large puddle of mud. Great gloops of it had to be emptied out of her boots. We abandoned having the picnic outside and picked our way back to the car park to eat within the shelter of the car.

We drove back via Bala. The mist was thicker in the mountains and cleared down by the lake. the rest of the family fell asleep and i drove on. A lot of driving without a pub lunch.

I can remember the first pesto sauce I made the proper way, crushing the garlic with salt, then the basil leaves and then the pine nuts. It was in the small dark kitchen of Katie and Simon’s flat in Trevignano on the shores of Lake Bracciano outside Rome. The kitchen was compact and I  Katie sat me down with a pestle and mortar and a great pile basil leaves and told me to get on with it. There seemed to be too much basil but after ten minutes or so it had ground down into a pungent sauce.

No picture can ever to justice to small bowl of pesto. It might be able to capture something of the vivid green. But colour is not really the point. It is the raw abrasiveness of the garlic soften by the creamed pine nuts, olive oil and parmesan cheese and over all that the scent and taste of basil, slightly astringent with aniseed.

We had it this evening with a large bowl of spaghetti mixed with pieces of roasted potato 1cm square and just cooked thinly sliced cabbage. The kids fought over the small pieces of potato and asked for more pesto to go over the pasta.

We should have been eating it outside in sun and heat and the shop bought basil will not have been as good as the stuff we ate in Trevignano but it all got eaten.

Later that evening in the dark kitchen in Trevignano we argued about the rise of New Labour and who we would be voting for in the election that was due to come in 1997.