Saturday morning started with a trip to the butchers at the back of The international store to get some lamb chops for the barbecue this evening. He was chopping up chickens when I got there with a great cleaver cum machete. It was about eighteen inches long and two inches deep. He held the pies of chicken carefully bringing the knife down in a powerful sweep the noise from which thudded through the shop. The chicken was cut up bones in all into pieces about an inch square and put into a bag hr marked £10.00 exactly.

When I asked for my chops he went into the walk in fridge and came out with what appeared to be a whole lamb. With another finer knife he started to take this apart. Peeling apart the breast, cutting round the shoulders until he held two racks of chops. He took these to the vertical electrical and ran them through before asking me how many I wanted. I winced for his fingers.

They are now all marinaded in olive oil, garlic and ground cumin.

I also bought my first box of Alphonso Mangoes. I have just lifted the lid to take in the deep honey smell of them. They almost smell too good to eat.

After that it was the grocers for fennel, onions, peppers, aubergine, coriander, dill, tomatoes, apples and bananas. `enough food to keep us going for about 24 hours.

From Ward’s I bought a squid and a bag of prawns.

There is nothing but blue sky this afternoon and I have already lit a small barbercue. Three aubergines are on there now slowly blackening and softening. Peppers will go on next and then onions and tomatoes to make a sort of roasted veg ratatouille.

Listening to the new National album with little bits of Josh Rouse inbetween. We went to see Josh Rouse on Thursday night in Leaf on Bold Street. The support was a bloke called Sean Rowe. He had a beard that is better than mine and a voice that was deep enough to mine coal from. He was very good.

Josh Rouse looked slightly too pleased with himself but then you can’t really blame him specially when he played a large part of the excellent 1972. We will be listening to more of that tonight.

Sometimes in the early morning the water can be so still it is like a laid flat piece of glass across the Bay. When it is still like that it draws close the land on the other side, the green and brown of the hills, closer, so the colours are clear and picked out in the light.

It is tempting then to take a boat out, to row beyond the rocks and let the boat sit still in the water the oars lifted out so the only sound is their rocking and the clear drops of water falling from them. The ripples from those drops and the faint movement of the boat in the water are the only things to ruffle the surface. When it is still like that there will be insects, their weight indenting the water.

Looked down over the side of the boat and the seaweed and kelp will float free above the seabed their colours indistinct and murky and then suddenly caught by a shaft of sunlight and drawn into focus.

Pick up the oars and row the boat slowly, savouring the quiet, take it past the other boats at anchor in Kitchen Cove, to the gap between Owen Island and Luke’s place on the shore. As you move out the surface of the water stays still but a gentle swell starts to roll in almost imperceptible from the open sea and the boat rides gently on it. As you pull out look over your left shoulder and watch as the Bay opens out.

First you can see the end of the Mizen and then beyond Owen Island the whole Bay lies open the water running down to the fat swell of the Atlantic and the milky point on the horizon where the sea meets the sky.

As you row back and the heat of the sun starts to beat against the water a faint breeze starts to pick up rifling the surface of the water. Later in the afternoon the breeze will be steady hum down from the hills corrugating the water and each ripple will catch the light of the sun until the water blazes in silver light.

Arguably the best bit about yesterday’s film were the last lines of the novel played across the screen, ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

The rest of it was gaudy and loud and in 3D. The rest of the family thought it was brilliant and that I was some kind of lurking curmudgeon pouring water on their parade.

I see so few films now I am not sure how I end up watching the second rate. Last year I had to spend a Saturday afternoon in the dark watching War Horse and its endless parade of sunsets.

Fifty/sixty years ago a film would be made by a few dozen people, constructed out of cardboard and light an unreal flickering world which required us to suspend the real world for an hour or two whilst the story was told. Those same films now engaged thousands in their make up and come up empty.

We were celebrating a birthday this morning and a return from Norway. So the day started slowly with lots of tea and bacon and some of us reading the cool magazine we bought from Cow & Co yesterday..

The weather was grey, cold and miserable but suddenly around 2.00 in the afternoon the sky cleared until there was nothing but blue sky and the sun started to beat down. I had time to plant out my tomatoes and weed around whatever is in the veg patch.

We had pizza for lunch. The recipe for the dough came from Kitchen & Co (and they took it from Jamie Oliver) and I let it rise until it was thick and bread like in the trays. I made three toppings; a thick spicy tomato sauce, large field mushrooms fried in garlic and oil until soft and half a dozen onions, sliced  and cooked slowly until almost caramalised.

We ate it outside before going off for a birthday treat to watch The Great Gatsby. it seemed a shame to leave the sun to go sit indoors and the 3D glasses didn’t work well with my glasses.