Two fifths of the family went to Ikea this morning. I stayed at home.

‘There’s a big bag of spinach in the fridge,’ I was told as they left.’ You could make some soup and there’s some sweet potato you could use up as well. ‘

Before doing that I walked down to Birkenhead to pick up some lamb from The International Store for a late lunch tomorrow. Hopefully the weather will be kind and I will get to cook it on the barbeque.

Down Oxton Road and opposite the old Birkenhead Brewery there are still great hefts of metal in a wall where the brewery had once stood. The offices are now a motorcycle shop although it is possible to make out the old tiles over the doors announcing its name. There are rumours that there were tunnels under the road the workers could walk through connecting the offices with the business end. The was a large heavy metal grate in the pavement that might have been part of it.

There is a new butcher in The International Store. I haven’t worked out where he is from yet. This morning he had a Bluetooth device in his ear and he was trying watch a programme on his phone as he went about sorting out his meat.

There was a woman in front of me with three small children. She had picked out of the freezer a four foot length of frozen fish. The butcher spent 15 minutes running the fish through his fearsome electric saw reducing it to hard chunks a couple of inches square. She kept turning to me to apologise for the time it was taking as her children watched me in bemusement.

Back home I made the soup by frying an onion in olive oil with some garlic. As it softened I tipped in the chunks of sweet potato. I seasoned it with salt, pepper and cumin poured on some water a brought it to a simmer for twenty minutes or so by which time the chunks of sweet potato were soft enough to squash with a wooden spoon. I then stirred in the very big bag of spinach marvelling again at how the mass of green leaves was able to dissolve into the pan.

It then all went through the Magimix but not before I had used it to make a marinade for the lamb.I had a steak sandwich for lunch. The steal was left over from last night when I almost set the kitchen alight setting alight to a ladle of Bell’s Whisky and pouring it over the cooked steak so that flames rose two foot into the air.

We had contrasting weather during our five days in Ahakista last week.

We arrived late at night and in the dark and woke up on Sunday morning to clear blue skies and still air. We were able to eat our breakfast outside sat round the green plastic table, drinking coffee and then more coffee, as the children drifted awake. It was warm enough to go out on the water and kayaks were taken out to look for seals.

Monday was grey and damp and good for a trip to Schull and lunch in Hackett’s, six of us, squeezed up to and around the small table in the back. The table is not much wider than a bench for sitting on and our plates and glasses pushed up and against each other and we were elblow to elbow eating our soups and stews and toasted sandwiches. Even in Schull there are familiar faces and at the bar I bumped into Wally who normally works the Olive stall at Bantry Market on a Friday morning.

Two of us went for a walk that afternoon up in the hills near were Curly lived. The rain came down in a thick mist that covered my glasses and reduced everything to a blur of colour.

On Tuesday afternoon we went for a walk at about the same time in the afternoon. It wasn’t raining but there were heavy clouds in the sky as we left the Cottage. We went up the road that leads up from Ahakista Stream and which carries on up to the hills that lie beneath Rosskerring. I had done the walk a few years before and could remember a loop that crossed over an old path to lead the way back down to the Cottage.

As we walked up the clouds cleared and the sun came out and we found ourselves taking off layers to cool ourselves down. I managed to avoid making any wrong turnings until we came to a place where the road ran out and we had to turn left down a green covered track that soon dissolved into a small covered path that run along and over a muddy stream.

Back on a road we walked past a field with some nosy bullocks ho came over curious to see who was passing them by.