Today I have had a quiet indulgent lunch just by myself.

Being the second Saturday of the month The Farmer’s Market has been on in New Ferry. So I was down there buying a chicken for supper tonight and tomorrow night and choosing what to have for lunch. I had been planning on lamb but then I spotted a pack of pigeon breasts, just right for frying quickly and then eating with salad and toast and a sweet/hot dressing. But they were £4.99 which seemed a lot for pigeon breasts so I went with four lamb chops.

I also picked up some primroses to add some colour in the garden for this grey February.

The lamb cooked very quickly.

To start I mashed up some garlic with salt and black cumin in our wooden pestle and mortar.

This mixture was then smeared over the lamb chops together with some olive oil and plenty of pepper.

A frying pan went on the a high heat and more oil was added. As the oil started to smoke I put in the chops shaking the pan as I went. There two long thin green chillies in the fridge so I put those in as well.

I turned the heat down once the chops had started to take on some colour and continued to cook them for another five minutes or so.

To eat I put a large dollop of Greek yogurt on my plate and drank a pint of good beer.

I could have licked the plate.

Listening to more Doug Paisley and getting ready to go out in the wet to plant the primroses.

Spend five minutes furtling around in the bottom of the freezer and there is usually a partridge to be found. I will buy one whenever I see them on sale and if there is no intention   to cook it immediately it will get squirrelled away for a Friday evening like tonight.

It was a particularly good one.

Having taken it out last night to defrost I spent twenty minutes leafing through various books to see if I could find a different way to cook it before again realising that keeping it simple would be best. So that meant roasting with some potatoes.

For the potato I cut it into rounds about half a finger thick. I then put these in the bottom of a small roasting dish in which I had melted some butter with a mixture of olive and groundnut oil on the stove. I left them to take on some colour giving them a turn every five minutes or so until they were almost cook through.

The oven then went on. I put the partridge on top of the potato and put some more pieces of butter on its breast and tucked a quartered red onion around.

That went into the oven for about 25 minutes. I basted it once. And as I think I may have mentioned it was very good.

For those who get down this far and are interested the new Doug Paisley album is almost as good as the the partridge. And with Garth Hudson on organ.

We had tried to leave the pub but we got only a few steps outside before it was clear that we would be soaked to the skin on the two hundred yard walk back down to the Cottage. The wind was blowing the rain hard so it came at you in a thick wet squall and the road was slick with running water. We pushed our way back through the door of the pub and shook the water from our coats and hair.

‘You won’t be going far if you’re worried about a bit of wet like that’ said the man from his stool by the bar. ‘Weather like that is not much more than a heavy thick mist and there’s not much point in getting damp in that. Unless you are out there in the water and you’re drowning you are going to get dry again after a while so you may as well get it over with and you’ll be dry soon enough.’

He smiled at the pints that were being poured for us at the bar ‘But wetting yourself some more on the inside will help should you need to get wet on the outside later.’

So we took off our coats and put them in the corner and stood back at the bar. The pints were put in front of us and we picked them up with wet cold hands.

‘You only think that it is wet here on account of the mist and rain but it isn’t really any of those things. We are here so close to the sea which is as wet as you can get that the and air comes straight off the surface of water and it can be blown by the wind or sucked up by the heat of the sun but all the air is is the clear water being pulled up from out there and being dropped back down again. and either you can see like on a night like this and it is thick enough to wet your skin through your coat or there is nothing to see but as you draw in your breathe your can taste how thick it is with the oxygen you suck in.’

‘Breathe in the air like that and it is not much different to sucking your pints.’

It was dark and the wind had picked up so we could hear the rain hammering against the windows of the pub. There wasn’t much point in going outside and getting wet to go back to the Cottage so we stood by the bar and took another pint. We saw the lights of a car pulling up outside. The lights went off and the man with a black beard walked in bringing the wet and the weather and air with him.

He shook out his hair as he closed the door pushing it back against the force of the wind.

‘Feck there’s some weather’ he said. ‘You could fill a bath with cold water with the weather out there.’

He walked up to the bar and Mary started to pour his pint.

‘This is a bastard month. All there is to it is grey sky, the wind and the wet. Have you ever seen a hill so bleak as it looks out to the world in February. There is nothing to grow on it and its as dull as the blade on a blunt knife.’

‘The only good thing about the month is there are no fish. Feck it’d be miserable to take a boat out in a month like this. Did you hear Tom Cronin here the other night telling the world that he was sick of mackerel and swearing on his last pint that he would not sit down to eat with the fish again? Well you give Tom Cronin the month of February to sit through and there’d be no feckin’ fish on his plate and he’d be hungary by then end of it.’

He took his pint from the bar and drank at it.

‘You missed the weather a month ago but you’ll still be clearing away the beach from your lawn. That house has been there two hundred years so you’ll not be worrying that some wind, rain and a bit of seawater will be washing it away but the weather that night was something to see. The sea it came in on the pier and it hit so hard you couldn’t see the top of the lights down there. What are they forty foot high and the light from them was wiped out by the sea.’

‘And it went at it like that for the whole of the night. We stood here and waited for the tide to go back and the water to go and it was if the moon had turned on its back and the tide stayed up and the water kept on coming in. Outside of here on the road going down there was a foot of water on the road coming down from where the stream up there had quit its banks and given up on its path down to the sea.’

‘You were lucky that all you had on the lawn there was stones and seaweed. Any other time of the year with a sea like that you could have been picking up mackerel from the grass there to have for your breakfast.’