On the advice of an Aunt I made an aubergine salad last night. Having set out my ten aubergine recipes last week she reminded me that Simon Hopkinson has a chapter on them in his book Roast Chicken & Other Stories – once voted the best cookbook ever.

She directed me to page 19 and an Elizabeth David recipe. It was straightforward to cook as I made a vast bowl of chicken noodle soup for various kids to eat.

The veg shop is selling vast Spanish onions – some of them almost six inches wide. We’d had one of these onions for lunch on top of the pizza and I used up the second for the salad.

It was cut into slices and then left to cook down in a wide pan with olive oil – the same pan I had used for lunch. After half an hour or so the onions was soft and glistening gold. I stirred in eight chopped plum tomatoes and a mix of spices – cumin, all-spice and cayenne. That all cooked some more whilst I sorted the aubergine.

The recipe suggested that you use your largest frying pan. I used a wok. The recipe was ambivalent as to the need to salt the aubergines. I tend to do it but rather than rinsing and drying them off in a tea towel I like to take up the pieces in my hand and squeeze out the moisture in my fist.

Having done that I put them in a bowl and stirred in some more olive oil. The wok then went on a very high heat and as it started to smoke I tipped in the aubergines. They seethed and spluttered and cooked quickly filling the kitchen with smoke.

Once the aubergines were done I poured the onion/tomato mixture over them and stirred it in with chopped mint and basil. The recipe had coriander instead of the basil but I had the basil in front of me and it needed eating. Writing this now I realise I forgot to stir in some chopped garlic at the end.

We ate it anyway with couscous and some tuna steaks and very good it was to.

So thank you to Gill for reminding me. I should also thank her for giving me the book for my birthday some years ago – although according to the card that is still inside it was late!

Not so Spring like this Saturday. The sun has been out but only intermittently and there has been a cold wind that hasn’t stopped all day.

All the children were in for lunch so we had pizza. The pizza base wasn’t great. Last weekend when cleaning out the cupboards in the kitchen I came across an old bag of wholemeal bread flour. As part of the tidy up I poured it into the jar that was full of ordinary white bread flour and mixed the two up. I think the wholemeal flour was a few years past its best before date and there was a slightly sour taste to it.

I made just the one large pizza and a smaller one for the new vegetarian. I covered it with some onions that I had left cooking slowly in olive oil for an hour, then basil leaves, slices of plum tomato, anchovies (not on the vegetarians option), garlic and pieces of feta cheese. It got mostly eaten.

In the garden I cut down lobelia that has been pulling down one of the walls, burnt up another bonfire and admired the beetroot shoots coming through in the greenhouse.

I had a nightmare involving the greenhouse last night. My mother had been in there and tidied up. I woke up in a cold sweat just as I realised the tidying up had involved the seeds I planted two weeks ago.

Another charming story, of the nature of so many found in popular natural histories, was once told by Lacépède, who quoted Admiral Pleville-Lepley as his authority. On the coast of Greenland are certain shallow bays which are almost landlocked. The water is clear, and the bottom of mud. There, throughout the winter, thousands of mackerel might be seen with their heads stuck in the mud and their tales pointing skywards. As might be supposed, when they first resumed their vertical position at the advent of summer, their eyesight was affected, and they were netted without difficulty; later on they were caught with hooks and lines.

The man had his hand over my arm and spoke to me closely.

‘There’s the bollocks you hear about mackerel. Did you know they have no air bladder so they have to keeping moving through the water to stop themselves from sinking and drowning? So if that is true, and I am told that it is, then how is the fish to spend the winter with its head in a bed of mud.’

‘All that they do when its cold is slow down and move closer to bottom of the ocean where they can where can move through the slow water. They have spent the summer here filling themselves with sprats and squid and anything that else thats of a size to get caught in their ever opening jaws. Feck I’ve had them out of the water here and they have been thick and heavy with what they have been eating and a fish may still have the tail of another smaller fish hanging out from between its teeth but it has still been greedy enough to take a bite at the hook that’s pulled it up short and out of the water and into my hand.’

‘If they keep away from the hooks for the summer then when it gets cold and dark they move out from here and into deep waters where then slow down and use up slowly that fat they have built up for themselves whilst they’ve been greedy over the summer. And as that fat gets used up they slow down some more until there’s no movement left and they have to keep what is left for the spring.’

‘Then there’s a click in the water that comes from a mixture of the extra light in the day and an extra degree of warmth in the sun and its time for them to rise up from their depths again and they come up in great black billowing clouds to the surface and into the light.’

He looked out over the Bay and let it wash over him. It was the first day the sun had been out since a day back in November and all the days of wind, rain and disturbance seemed to dissolve behind him in the rush of light that came in off the water. He took it all in, breathing slowly.

He put his hand in his pocket and his fingers played with the loose change the coins rolling over each other. There was some expectation there, money to spend and things to do. He could start to put behind him some of the day to day mire and think about days in the sun.

There was a voice beside him ‘Feck it’s not the sun that you need but an hour catching fish and then some time listening to feck all being said in the pub.’

‘On a day like today you need to gather things and put them behind you and take your position out there on the water and wait for the fish to come in.’

‘Feck. It is the second week of March now and getting so it is light in the morning and there is time enough in the evening to see what you are doing.’

‘There are mackerel now that’ll be making there way through the water but they won’t be hungary for the hook just yet but give them another week or so and they’ll have a bite at you and that’ll take some weight off you shoulders.’

‘And while we wait for those weeks to pass I’ll buy you a pint and we can talk about mackerel and the waters they swim in.’