A cat has just come back into the house looking every inch the drowned rat. It was Tom and there was nothing about him to suggest that he could see out the irony in the situation.

We went for a walk this afternoon on the footpath that runs above the marshes beyond Parkgate. It was warm with a warm wind although the sun was hardly out. As we walked towards Caldy the sky was flat and grey ahead of us rising in a great sheet as if gathering itself up for the storms ahead.

We saw our first swallows of the year and there was a sense of summer in the air.

That sense of weather to come came into full bloom over the evening. We went to eat at Camp & Furnace buoyed by a good review by Jay Raynor in yesterday’s Observer.

He got it about right. Half of the pleasure of being there is the space itself. I can remember walking through the old warehouses years ago when it housed an art exhibit that must of been part of a Liverpool Biennial. The art may even have been the place itself and the discarded pieces of iron and machinery that had been left behind by progress.

Jay Raynor had had the smoked tomato soup with crab on toast so I had it too. It was very good and I found myself trying to work out how I would make it at home. I could put some trays of tomatoes in the barbeque and leave them to cook down over an hour or so and then scoop them out and squeeze them out with their juices.

After that it was a steak sandwich; pieces of rump steak mixed up with a red onion marmalade between two pieces of toasted sour dough bread that crunched properly as you bit through it. There was a small tin cup filled with crispy and hot French Fries as well.

As we ate the sky must have welled up outside and then the rain came down. There were flashes of lightening and then the heavy sound of thunder overhead. The lightening became brighter and suddenly there were people running behind us muttering about bad leaks. We could hear the rain now louder than the thunder on the roof above us.

As we drove home we could see forks of lightening criss-crossing the Liverpool skyline.