So Thursday was an interesting evening. An Old School Dinner in The Royal Liverpool Golf Club in Hoylake. It was a wonder they let me in and there was a temptation to sneak out at some point to do some defacing to all of the large Esther McVey posters littering Meols Drive. Old school dinners are not really my thing and there wasn’t much of Thursday night that went towards persuading me that they should be. Thirty-three years after leaving and there is noone that I am in contact with from me having been there. Then I find myself in a room with dark purple walls full of people I don’t know, some of them wearing strange ties and jackets, and then one or two of the faces start to coalesce into something half familiar and then there are strangers walking up to shake my hand and telling me I look no different apart from the beard. All very strange and slightly unsettling. For the dinner I found myself sat next to the headmaster’s wife – she did very well and must have had long years of practise being sat next to the socially awkward. It transpired that we could talk about cooking and the need for sharp knives. She has a drawer full of them. I have just the one. I used it at lunchtime today to cut up some dirty carrots for soup. The carrots were cooked in butter with a sliced onion and flavoured with ginger, lemon and honey. Each bowlful was sprinkled with crushed toasted cumin and very good it was to.

The brightness of the soup made up for the grey sky and wet outside.