We had tried to leave the pub but we got only a few steps outside before it was clear that we would be soaked to the skin on the two hundred yard walk back down to the Cottage. The wind was blowing the rain hard so it came at you in a thick wet squall and the road was slick with running water. We pushed our way back through the door of the pub and shook the water from our coats and hair.

‘You won’t be going far if you’re worried about a bit of wet like that’ said the man from his stool by the bar. ‘Weather like that is not much more than a heavy thick mist and there’s not much point in getting damp in that. Unless you are out there in the water and you’re drowning you are going to get dry again after a while so you may as well get it over with and you’ll be dry soon enough.’

He smiled at the pints that were being poured for us at the bar ‘But wetting yourself some more on the inside will help should you need to get wet on the outside later.’

So we took off our coats and put them in the corner and stood back at the bar. The pints were put in front of us and we picked them up with wet cold hands.

‘You only think that it is wet here on account of the mist and rain but it isn’t really any of those things. We are here so close to the sea which is as wet as you can get that the and air comes straight off the surface of water and it can be blown by the wind or sucked up by the heat of the sun but all the air is is the clear water being pulled up from out there and being dropped back down again. and either you can see like on a night like this and it is thick enough to wet your skin through your coat or there is nothing to see but as you draw in your breathe your can taste how thick it is with the oxygen you suck in.’

‘Breathe in the air like that and it is not much different to sucking your pints.’

It was dark and the wind had picked up so we could hear the rain hammering against the windows of the pub. There wasn’t much point in going outside and getting wet to go back to the Cottage so we stood by the bar and took another pint. We saw the lights of a car pulling up outside. The lights went off and the man with a black beard walked in bringing the wet and the weather and air with him.

He shook out his hair as he closed the door pushing it back against the force of the wind.

‘Feck there’s some weather’ he said. ‘You could fill a bath with cold water with the weather out there.’

He walked up to the bar and Mary started to pour his pint.

‘This is a bastard month. All there is to it is grey sky, the wind and the wet. Have you ever seen a hill so bleak as it looks out to the world in February. There is nothing to grow on it and its as dull as the blade on a blunt knife.’

‘The only good thing about the month is there are no fish. Feck it’d be miserable to take a boat out in a month like this. Did you hear Tom Cronin here the other night telling the world that he was sick of mackerel and swearing on his last pint that he would not sit down to eat with the fish again? Well you give Tom Cronin the month of February to sit through and there’d be no feckin’ fish on his plate and he’d be hungary by then end of it.’

He took his pint from the bar and drank at it.

‘You missed the weather a month ago but you’ll still be clearing away the beach from your lawn. That house has been there two hundred years so you’ll not be worrying that some wind, rain and a bit of seawater will be washing it away but the weather that night was something to see. The sea it came in on the pier and it hit so hard you couldn’t see the top of the lights down there. What are they forty foot high and the light from them was wiped out by the sea.’

‘And it went at it like that for the whole of the night. We stood here and waited for the tide to go back and the water to go and it was if the moon had turned on its back and the tide stayed up and the water kept on coming in. Outside of here on the road going down there was a foot of water on the road coming down from where the stream up there had quit its banks and given up on its path down to the sea.’

‘You were lucky that all you had on the lawn there was stones and seaweed. Any other time of the year with a sea like that you could have been picking up mackerel from the grass there to have for your breakfast.’

I am conscious that it has been quiet from here over the last few days; a combination of a busy few days during the day and a busy weekend.

The good news is that there has been food and we ate well over the weekend telling all who were interested just how good Bobby Womack was.

We were out Friday night eating a roast leg of venison that had been marinated for a long time in red wine before being put in the oven. It was excellent, rich and gamey, and reminded me that I have recently been given a rabbit that is now resting in the freezer and waiting for me to do something constructive with it. Feelings run high in the family over the eating of rabbit (we had for a short while a pet rabbit called Cookie) and I suspect that I might even have difficulties persuading Galen to join me in eating it.

Saturday lunchtime was pitta bread stuffed with falafel, lamb, yogurt, onions, tomatoes, cucumber and lashings of hot chilli sauce. The kids were able to pick and choose and were just about all able to choose something they liked. The falafel were made using a dried chickpea flour mix from The International Store which looks a bit like the dried stuffing mix I seem to remember from a long time ago. Once it is mixed with water it needs 20 minutes or so to thicken up and you can then use a very neat falafel shaper to scoop out the mixture into just the right flat pat shape to be dropped into a shallow pan of hot oil.

Saturday might we had friends to stay and we enjoyed a long slow meal. I like a meal that starts with a drink and some crisps, then moves on to something more substantial to nibble (in this case chorizo and pedron peppers), and then on to soup and the start of the meal proper.

The soup was a beetroot soup with black cumin from the first Moro cookbook. The black cumin came from The International Store and apart from the price seemed fairly similar to ordinary cumin. The soup was flavoured slightly with sherry vinegar which helped to cut through some of the richness.

We then had cod pan fried and roasted in the oven, with saffron flavoured rice, chickpea salad and some more of the kale from the garden which just seems to keep on giving.

Then it was roast quince with honey and cream and to finish a great block of Tasty Lancashire and an equally great block of Double Gloucester.

We were replete at the end of it.

I did the washing up listening to Don’t Stand Me Down by Dexy’s Midnight Runners which just keeps on getting better and better.