Last year I called the eldest and only son a ‘bloody idiot’ for putting the hedge trimmer through its electrical cable. Yesterday he had vindication as I did exactly the same thing. There was a satisfying bang and a blue spark and then nothing. So that must make me an idiot too, if not a bloody one. Having mended it once before I knew what to do and had it working again in ten minutes or so.

Trimming the hedges was the second job of the day. The first was mending a doorknob. One of the joys of living in an old house are those things that fall apart and can then be left a few months before being mended. The door knob to the cloakroom has been coming off in our hand for the last few weeks. Yesterday morning it took four screws and ten minutes to mend it which I suppose must beg the question as to why I did not get round to it sooner.

Tea was a fractious fish and chips as various children announced that either the would not be home for tea or they had plans to be out for the evening and could they have their tea now rather in the hour or sos time I had planned. When the three that were left got round to their tea it was very good.

I had watched Simon at Wards taking the fillets off the haddock that morning. I seasoned them with salt and pepper and then ran then them through trays of flour, then egg and finally breadcrumbs. I am always slightly amazed that this process works so well. The breaded fish goes into the hot oil a flaccid white sticky mess and comes out with a stiff coat of fried brown bread crumbs encasing the creamy white flakes of fish. We ate them with potatoes that had been cut into chips and roasted in the oven, peas (lots of peas) and a great jar of tartare sauce. Next time I will make my own tartare sauce.

Today’s job is going to be planting garlic. This will be to give the empty parts of the veg plot something to do over the winter months. I have grown garlic before almost by mistake. I just push some old cloves that were showing too much shoot into the ground and I was surprised when a few months later I had a few bulbs I could harvest.

This time I have been more scientific about it and have been on The Garlic Farm website and have bought myself some proper seed garlic. I have a combination of Elephant Garlic and Vallelado Wight. They will be going into the ground this afternoon and hopefully I will be pulling them up next summer. So come back here in six months or sos time and see how they are getting on.

Garlic is of course good for you and it is one of the kitchen staples. If there isn’t any in the kitchen I start to get nervy. It is so good for you that I have persuaded myself that it acts as a counter-balence to all the too much beer, red wine and red meat I punish my body with. Keep eating garlic and it will be okay.

Many years ago I was given a two kilo string bag of garlic from Spain. It was brought over by Simon who had travelled to friends before he came to see us. He carried the heady perfume of it around with him for weeks. I put the garlic in a great bowl in the kitchen and we steadily ate our way through it over the course of a couple of months. The smell of it filled the small house in Oxford we lived in at the time.

In the meantime it is still warm in the garden. There is a bumper crop of apples. rather frustratingly some of the best ones for eating have come from a small tree that has not produced much before and which I had mentally cut down so I could enlarge the veg plot. It has bought itself a stay of execution.

The tomatoes are still going red in the greenhouse which means I won’t get to try out a trick I heard about on the radio during the week for reddening green tomatoes which involved putting them in a paper bag with a banana. Next week perhaps. And my sole remaining pepper is starting to turn red. I am looking forward to eating it!

There was a deep grumble about the men in the pub. It was mid February and the weather was bleak. A grey fug lay over the land and there had been no sign of the sun or blue sky since the week after Christmas. The sky was grey and stayed grey and whatever colour there may have been in the hills from the grass and the heather had been washed out by the weather. There was no rain to complain about although the wind that came in from the sea filled the air with wet and it hung in the air and filled all the corners with a penetrating damp. There was no throwing it off and despite the chill everything was clammy to touch.

The grey weather had been so persistent that had even managed to drain the talk from the men. The weather and its changes was the starting point for any evenings talk but when it stayed the same and that same was grey and overbearing it just rubbed the talk out of them.

As Tom Cronin said ‘Why the feck can’t it rain and we can talk about how wet it is.’

There were eight of them in the pub. Six of them sat round the low rectangular table in the corner under the window by the bar, three of them on the seat by the window and three of them perched on stools. The curtain was drawn against the window and outside it was dark now. The other two men stood at the bar. Tom Cronin had his back to the bar and faced over the men and the man with the black beard with his back to the men, leaning with his elbows over the bar one hand on his pint and the other twisting at a small pile of crumpled notes and coins.

Each man had his pint and they drank them slowly. As one of them finished he nodded to whoever’s glass was nearly empty and there were a few murmured words as the glasses went onto the bar and the pints were replenished. A radio played quietly and if anyone spoke it sounded too loud and whatever short burst of conversation started it soon came to an end and whoever had spoken would retreat back to his glass drawing on the pint.

The man with the black beard turned to face the men.

‘Feck the feckin’ weather’ he said. ‘It can stay like this for another six weeks and will you all be sat here drinking your pints too scared to say a word for frightening the quiet. It’s not the weather that’s holding your tongues. You’ve all been sat here too many evenings and there is feck all left for us to say.’

He took a drink at his pint. ‘When was the last time, when did any of you last take out a boat to catch some fish? Cause I tell you that’s what I need.’

The men were quiet and had no answer for him.

‘There’s no feckin’ fish there now’ said Tom Cronin. ‘And any fish that is down there is too feckin’ deep and slow to be caught. You have to wait now to May or June for them to come back. There’s no point in taking a boat out for them now.’

The man turned to him ‘You know as I do that Jack Mitchell had three fish from the pier in Doneen on Christmas day morning and that was but six weeks ago. If there are fish there on Christmas Day there by the pier there’ll be fish there out in the bay where the water is deep. I’ll be out there tomorrow and then we can talk.’

Tom Cronin took a drink at his pint ‘Feck the fish that Jack Mitchell had were the last to go. Those were the fish that got left behind after last summer. The rest of them will be out in the sea too far to go out in your boat. If you’re going to catch fish you need to wait for them to come back and come back to the surface and for that you’ll need a change in this light. And that will not come until there is a change in this weather and the days draw longer. There’ll be no fish out there until then.’

‘There will always be fish out there’ the man said. ‘Three fish don’t get left behind. If there’s three mackerel swimming there’ll be another few hundred down there with them. I’m surprised that Jack just got the three. They may swim a bit more slowly but that means I just need to give them more time.’

Patrick Holland was sat on one of the stools and he bent round to look back and up at the man ‘And what will you catch them with. A feather’s not going to work in this water no matter how bright and flash it is. You’ll need something to wake them up down there.’

‘I’ll use a hook and a line’ the man said.’ And if I need something else with the feathers then I’ll find that out when I’m out there.’

He lifted his glass and finished his pint. ‘ Now I’m going home and I’ll be back here tomorrow with a bucket of mackerel and then we can talk some more.’

With the he lifted himself up from where he was leaning back on the bar and walked out of the door leaving the men to talk about the fish he might catch the next day.

I am not a great one for The Telegraph but if I do pick it up then will usually try and make my way to the obituaries. There will normally be some Johnny or Jane with more than two barrels to their name who did their bit in the war and managed to continue to lead  an exotic life with exciting times.

This last Sunday it was the turn of Marshall Meek, who died aged 88. He was one of Britain’s leading naval architects and chief naval architect of the Liverpool-based Blue Funnel Line during the 1950’s.

Marshall Meek was born at Auchtermuchty, Fife, on April 22 1925, the son of a monumental sculptor. The family were Exclusive Brethren, a fellowship which brought Marshall friendships worldwide and into which, in 1957, he married. He broke with the sect soon after; it had barred his mother and sister from the wedding, and was demanding that its adherents leave professional bodies they belonged to. But he continued to worship with more tolerant Brethren.

The first ship he designed for Blue Funnel was Centaur, to carry passengers, livestock and cargo between Malaysia and Western Australia. 

One of versions on How to Kill a Mackerel compares, in the introduction, time spent in the Cottage being a bit like spending time on a boat. The quarters are cramped and the bedrooms run into each other and after a night in the pub the night can be picked over in bed shouting through to the other rooms. Having put out that thought and went on to say….

‘Every good boat should have a manual of instruction, a guide as to how it moves best through the water, how to handle its ropes and get the best out of idiosyncrasies; the instructions passed by word of mouth or on a few gathered, scribbled notes. Patience Gray’s A Centaur’s Kitchen, was composed as a manual of instruction to the cooks of The Blue Funnel Line’s latest addition to its fleet, The Centaur. The owners had appealed to Patience Gray to write them a set of recipes that their Chinese cooks could execute. As the dust jacket declares the consequence and will appeal to those who enjoy their food with bags of flavour and richness, and who respond to the firm yet inspired guidance of a writer who knows what’s what.

‘Of course I do not know what’s what. But leaf through the illustrated pages of the Centaur’s Kitchen and it is clearly something more than the words spelled out on its dust jacket. It is a collection of recipes pared down to the bare essentials. They are for eating outside, with friends, cooked with the ingredients at hand. You feel reading it that if you have grasped the fundamentals hinted at through its hundred or so pages you will know all you need to know. You may even know what’s what.

‘The pictures are line drawings of the food, the kitchens and rooms and people where and for whom it was cooked. All of the recipes are clearly bound up with where they were learnt and perfected. They are simple but really say all that they need to say. And in the almost implied connection between recipe, the cooking and history there is the memory and desire.

‘It would be nice to do it as seamlessly as Patience Gray but I am not up to that. But it provided a starting point for these rough notes and jottings.

‘Patience Grey wrote her book as a manual of instruction for the Chinese cooks of the Centaur Line and so this book is a manual of instruction, a guide to cooking in the Cottage. It is not about the measuring of ingredients but about the taking of what is available or on offer and making use of it and hopefully making something that will be good.’