So it is most years around the first week in May I find myself putting the same question into Google “Why does eating asparagus make your wee smell like that?!?”

Forty five minutes this morning were spent on a bike dawdling along the promenade from the Seacombe Ferry Terminal to New Brighton. If I had been doing it properly – like the people I passed dolled up in lycra, helmets and sun-glasses I might have broken a sweat. But my bike is covered in rust and I would not suit lycra – so I took it slowly pausing to take photos of Liverpool looming in the distance.

Back at Seacombe I pushed the bike into the back of the car and made my way to Wards to buy some different fish and a goose egg. As I walked through Birkenhead I remembered that there had been a fat John Dory sat on on the ice. Unfortunately they didn’t have any this week and the goose eggs had sold out. So I came away with half a dozen duck eggs and two slips of sole caught from the Dee.

I then made the trip over to Claremont  to pick up a couple of bunches of the first of this years asparagus. We had them for lunch with scrambled duck eggs.

One of the problems with having a big basement is that if something gets put away there is a serious risk of it never getting found again.

We almost had this problem with the ham stand at Christmas and on Saturday afternoon we lost a bike pump.

The sun was out and so I thought I would take my bike out for its annual spin around the block. As the bike had been languishing in the garage for the last 12 months it was perhaps no surprise that all its tyres were flat. So started the hunt for the bike pump. Over the years we have developed a number of places for putting it where it can be found. All these proved useless and it was apparent that during a tidy up it had been put somewhere else. I found one bike pump which might have been the one one we lost before this one. Unfortunately the found pump was out of air.

So after a certain amount of huffing and puffing I went out to buy a new one.

Tyres pumped I sprayed the rust on the bike with all the WD40 I could find and took it round the block. It all seemed to work without making too much noise although by the time I got home I found myself walking with my feet six inches further apart than normal.

Most years having taken the bike round the block it goes back into the garage to develop another layer of rust for twelve months. Unusually I took it out again Sunday morning.

This time I took it into the car down to New Brighton and spent an hour and a half going all the way from New Brighton to Hoylake and back again. Possibly the most exercise I have done for quite a few years – particularly on the way back from Hoylake into the wind.

When I got home I found that my feet were now twelve inches further part than normal.

That evening we ate out of the Morito cook book – flat bread cooked in a hot iron pan on the stove, a spinach and fennel pie, hummus, beetroot borani and lamb chops.

We have spent the weekend just listening to vinyl. Last night it was the turn of Sly and the Family Stone and some particularly funky Ike Turner.

There was an abundance of red mullet in Ward’s this morning but only two of us to eat it. So I got the biggest one they had along with a packet of wild garlic.

Back home in the evening I parboiled 4 potatoes, cut them into rounds and set them to fry in olive oil.

The oven went on high and I laid each fillet of fish on thin layer of sliced red onion and tomatoes. Some pine nuts were scattered along with a few leaves of wild garlic.

The rest of the wild garlic was wilted in a pan with a good hunk of butter.

Once all on the plate it was very good. We listened to the ragged blues of Bessie Smith.

I went down to Ward’s Fish early yesterday morning expecting to come back with five small red mullet but instead found myself with a bag full of spiny sea urchins.

The plan had been that the red mullet be filleted and then roasted in the oven with some pine nuts and a smattering of olive oil. As they cooked I would have cooked some linguine which was then to be mixed with skinned tomatoes and basil leaves. The red mullet would then have been placed on top of each plate of linguini.

As it happened Ward’s didn’t have and red mullet so I bought a monkfish tail instead. I was then asked if I wanted some sea urchins. There were two of them sat on the ice. I hesitated but was a reassured that they were giving them away.

There then followed a story about how they had come by them collected at the same time as divers collected their fat scallops. They had been expecting a half dozen of the sea urchins but had been given a box of them.

As I hesitated further a Chinese lady stood next to me said that she would have four of them and she told me you could either have them raw or with fried rice. She was picking up a bag of salmon heads and I should have asked her what she was planning on doing with them.

So I said I would take five of the sea urchins – one each for those that were eating.

Back home I went through some books to try and find some clue as to what to do with them. The best I could come up with was Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s book of fish which gave them a brief mention without giving them a specific profile. He suggested that the best way to get into them was by using a special tool called a coupe oursin. 

Although I had a good look through the kitchen cupboards perhaps unsurprisingly I was able to locate a coupe oursin.  As a alternative Hugh suggested a tough pair of kitchen scissors inserted into the mouthparts and then used to cut away a hole big enough to get in.

This worked surprisingly well. Inside each shell there was a pool of dark brackish water, some folds of black gunk and five pale creamy tongues of ‘roe’. We later learnt that although these globes are described as roe they are in fact the gonads, or more particularly, the reproductive organ of the sea urchin.

I teased them out with a teaspoon and they were surprisingly good with a rich creamy flavour of the sea.

Five or six years ago when I went out to watch Tommy Arundel haul in his lobster pots most of them came out of the water with a couple of sea urchins attached. These were thrown back into the sea.

This summer I will see if he can pass a few over so we can try them fresh out of Dunmannus Bay.

After the sea urchins we had a dozen qual eggs and then the monkfish – cooked with honey and sherry vinegar together with buttery saffron flecked crusty rice.