When a member of the family has been away for a few weeks and then is home for a brief weekend before Easter there is a temptation to be accepting of whatever it is that she wants for her tea on the first evening back.

She wanted pizza. And almost immediately there was a debate as to whether there was enough time to make some dough from getting back from work, giving it time to prove and then to make a good thick tomato sauce for the topping.

In the event there was time for all of these things. The dough was made before I got home and the various toppings were cooked, chopped and laid out, ready to be cooked in a vey hot oven.

The pizzas were very good and I might have written more about them but have found myself befuddled over the last half hour over an argument with the youngest member of the family as to the difference between an objective and subjective viewpoint.

I suspect she was right.

So slightly to my surprise early Wednesday morning I found myself walking round a property and eyeing up its potential as a palace for the sale of good Irish cheese.

Afterwards someone sent me message ‘Any Scope? or too big/expensive?’ and I was bound to reply “All three!”

It was very big. Three floors; basement, ground and first, stretching back from the street. In the basement there was a strengthen piece of glass covering on the floor with a do not dive in sign. This was a well and turns out the place had once been an ink factory and the water had been used for the ink. The building was late Victorian and there was something of a warehouse about the place.

The ground floor still had the old wooden floor. It was rough and scuffed with use but looked intact and good enough to scrub up. The ceiling was held up with heavy grey ironwork and there were high windows going down one side of the room and at the back.

The first floor had a vaulted ceiling with the same heavy ironwork. It had the same windows and although they were covered up it felt light and airy. It didn’t take too much imagination to clear away the factory fittings and to put down a bar at one end and then a series of tables and chairs and groups of people sat round eating and drinking.

But then there was an awkward dark mezzanine floor, a tatty small kitchen and an internal office that had been created out of plaster board and plastic.

The place itself was expensive and there would be a heavy cost in doing anything with it. And then when all the ‘it’ had been done would there be enough people to come and make it work. There are only a limited number Irish cheeses it is possible to sell in a week.

We shall see.

Saturday morning and getting my head around the food for Sunday all I could think about was the fact we had too much Sumac in the house.

I am reasonably sure that the first time I heard about Sumac was watching one of the early Nigella Lawson programmes on the TV, back when she was good. I bought some then and now if I see some in a shop I will buy it again just so I don’t run out.

But for the last few months there has been a packet on the side waiting to get opened and so today we had a go at it.

The International Store was selling chickens with feet on. The man behind the counter offered to chop them up for me but I reckoned that I had knives as sharp as his.

I found the cleaver and cut two chickens into four pieces each.

A large metal tin then went on the oven and the chicken pieces were turned in the hot oil until they started to take on some colour.

As the chicken was done it was taken out of the pan and replaced with a mixture of onions, spring onions and garlic. The Sumac was stirred in and as the onions wilted the chicken was put back on top with a generous grinding of pepper salt and more of the Sumac.

We ate it half an hour later with salad and yogurt and roast potatoes.

To my surprise the first impression I got from the day was how important it was to get it right in terms of who you were going into the venture with.

Maybe this came down to the contrast between the experiences of the first two speakers.

First person on was the man from Higgidy. They had started as a group of three friends – one of them doing the pie making and the other two helping out. Two out of the three had got married and they were all still working together after how many years of doing it.

There was time for questiomns and someone asked about the dynamic between the three of them and what difficulties there might have been. That was then my note-book came out for the first time ‘friendship, partnersip and tension’ I scribbled.

The next speaker was a Camilla Barnard from a company called Rude Health which had started out by making a particularly good type of muesli and then moved onto other things including porridge and cereal like snacks. The genesis of the business had come about when she and her husband and their neighbours had gathered round a kitchen table and tried to work out how to make a muesli they all liked. They came up with something and the business was up and running. She then turned the talk round the question that had been asked as to the difficulties in starting a business with friends and said that the neighbours were no longer part of the business and they were no longer friends.

Next up was the lady from Planet Organic, Renée Elliot. She talked about some of her partners and mentioned the 18 months worth of litigation that followed on her falling out with one of.

Jimmy who made and sold the chilled coffee had started in the business with his sister and it was clear that she was still very much part of it all but kept in the background.

It transpired that the two lads who had the pizza business, Pizza Pilgrims, when they were asked the question as to whether there had been any testing of their friendship working together, they were brothers.

They were on stage together but the others were there by themselves but the clear impression was given, and I think someone may even have said it, you can’t do these things on your own. It is important to have people there with you as part of the business. But you have to trust those people otherwise you run the risk of a bad falling out.