So not having been back to Roja de Pinchos for the best part of two months I have gone second best and started making them at home.

It is not too difficult to do so long as you get the system right.

The first thing that you need is some good bread – ideally a long thin baguette that can be sliced up about half an inch thick and make up a mouthful.

Put the grill on and start toasting the slices of bread and then assemble the rest of the ingredients.

This meant a bunch of basil, some anchovies, olives, artichokes, mozzarella, peppers and most important of all a small pot of cocktail sticks.

Once the bread was toasted it then became a question of speed and putting together.

I used a basil leave as a base and then assembled the rest over the top in whatever combination came most quickly to hand and then pinning it all together with a cocktail stick.

We wolfed them down. Next time I will try them with some fried quail’s eggs.

Afterwards we had the chicken studded with olives, pickled lemons and harissa and crusty rice made with pitta.

We finished the chicken and rice off this evening in a sort of middle-eastern stir fry listening to Boz Scaggs.

Most of today was spent walking a section of the Cheshire Sandstone Ridge high up over Frodsham looking out over the sweep of the Mersey and in the distance the brown square of the Anglican Cathedral and the Radio City Tower of Liverpool.

We had printed the map and directions for the walk from the page on the internet and it was one of those walks where you continually misjudge how far you need to go until you get to the next direction. So along the way there were one or two wrong turnings and retracing our steps. We were consoled by two ladies who were walking in sensible shoes and a good map. For every wrong turn we took they seemed to do another so we kept doubling past each other other.

Back home I made a tub of liquorice ice cream and two dozen meringues ready for lunch tomorrow.

I should mention that the recipe for the liquorice ice cream comes courtesy of The Good Things Cafe and that we are listening to to Gladys Knight & the Pips singing Midnight Train to Georgia.

Weather-wise it has been a strange day. Yesterday afternoon a thin mist would blow in through the trees a few gardens up and I thought it was someone lighting an anti-social fire in the garden. This morning we woke to a thick fog and it hasn’t really gone away as I sit here writing this in the early evening. Every so often the sun has tried to burn through and there has been a flash of blue sky or the white ball of the sun has appeared in the grey its brightness diffused.

But then this afternoon we drove ten miles to the other side of the Wirral to walk from Neston alongside the Dee marshes and there was nothing but blue sky and sun overhead. The marshes seemed to stretch on forever in the light until they came to a sudden end at a bank of low cloud that blanketed off the whole of North Wales.

There were lambs in the field and walking round a corner we came across a group of people crowded around a pinch in the fence. They were there taking pictures of a lamb that had just been been born and had not even had time to struggle to its feet.

Some of us felt a slight pang of guilt over the lamb stuffed with spinach that had been enjoyed last night and in some ways went down even better cold as part of todays lunch. But then we consoled ourselves by thinking on how good it tasted.