Should you ever be in Oxford with an hour or two to kill then there is no better way of doing so than going for a wander round The Pitt Rivers Museum. It is down the road from South Parks and almost opposite Keble College and is tucked behind The Natural History Museum.

In fact you have to walk through The Natural history Museum to get to it. This can be a bit of a distraction as The Natural History Museum is itself worth spending time in and if you only have an hour, a large part of this could be taken up dawdling past the cases of stuffed animals and birds, butterflies stuck with a pin and dinosaur bones.

On the moment The Natural history Museum is being renovated so most of the cabinets are either empty or boxed up. There was still a good collection of ape skulls to admire as something of a precursor to the main event.  

The Pitt Rivers Museum itself is like a giant Victorian box of curiosities from all over the world. It has been spruced up and modernised around the edges but the main hall and the floor is just as it was twenty five years ago when I first went and probably not too far off what it was like 100 years ago.

The main floor is open to the iron struts of the roof two stories up and is crammed full of dark wood glass cabinets which in turn are filled to overflowing with the University’s archeological and anthropological collections. Around the side of the room are two open galleries also filled with cabinets. The room is dark and gloomy and the cabinets are badly lit so you have to peer in close to see what is in them.

Each cabinet is devoted to a particular subject be it musical instruments, model boats, toys made from tin cans, swords, guns, pikes and clubs. Items from different continents and countries jostle up next to each and sometimes over and around each other. Some items maybe four hundred years old others almost contemporary. Look closer again and most things are labelled – sometimes by hand in black ink on the item itself. There are dolls and shields, mummified cats and mummies. The room is dominated by a vast totem pole that stands at the far end reaching up almost as high as the ceiling. It is from North America and had to be cut into two to get it to a size it could be brought over the ocean.

Always the highlight is the cabinet of shrunken heads. These are about the size of a large fist, black with dye and made by peeling away the skin from the skull, treating it so it shrinks and stuffing it with sand and then moulding it back into the shape of a head, the lips and other orifices carefully sewn up. The same cabinet has a number of skulls and other trophies of war, some of them decorated with shells and pieces of bone. The labelling reminds us that it was not so long ago that went into cutting off the heads of our enemies and putting them on spikes to ward off others. There is a helpful copy engraving of the Bonfire Nights plotters – heads on spikes.

The whole place is a complete antidote to the idea of a modern museum with its bright light and interactivity and eagerness to please but with nothing to look at. I suspect that there is a type of museum curator who would look on in horror.

The place is dusty with unkempt corners but it is an immersive experience and an hour or two killed does not really do it justice.

Whilst we were there Galen did some drawing including a picture of James Bond’s gum that was in the cabinet of pistols.

I went hoping that there would be a good book to buy about the place and its exhibits. There doesn’t appear to be. There should be – it would make a good one.

We are spending the weekend in Oxford and on Saturday evening we were booked in to go to the panto (although it wasn’t really a panto) starting at 7.00pm sharp. We needed somewhere too eat beforehand. We thought briefly about having food afterwards but trying to get some good food at 9.30 on a Saturday might seemed like too much effort so we went for late lunch option.

We were tempted by a review by Jay Rayner from a few weeks back for a pub called The Magdalen Arms were he had eaten a pie for two that could only be described in glowing terms. It was almost next door to the theatre but it transpired they closed for food for the afternoon and by the time they reopened we would only have about half an hour to enjoy our pie before we would have to leave for the theatre. That would be cutting it fine. So we sat down and thought through our other options.

It is three or four years since we have been to The Chiang Mai Kitchen. For a while it was our most visited restaurant. When the kids were small and we could leave them behind to go shopping in Oxford we would go for a quick lunch promising ourselves that we would restrict ourselves to just a main course. Inevitably when we got in and sat down resolve went out of the window and we would be seduced into have one of the starters. We had taken the kids there for lunch once but it had not been a great success. They were happy with the plates of rice but fidgeted and moaned over everything else.

We looked at the menu. They did a plain plate of noodles. That would keep the youngest member of the family happy so we booked to go there.

Afterwards we agreed that the meal had been slightly disappointing. The menu was the same as it was twenty years ago and although it still tempted the starters felt slightly tired. The still tasted good though, pork dumplings and sate sticks of chicken and beef, stuffed, deep fried chicken wings, tiny spring rolls  and deep dried prawns with a sweet clear sauce and plates of sate sauce. There wasn’t much left.

My main course was minced beef with chilli and garlic and plain boiled rice. I think I have had it every time I have been there and last night it was just as good. I have tried to make it at home but have never managed to get it right. I think that it because I have always sliced up the beef rather than mincing it. It tasted of those things you want from Thai food, clean flavours, hot and sour. I will need yo give myself another go making it at home.

Earlier in the afternoon I had managed to squeeze in an hour or so by myself in Oxford. I wasted some of the time drinking a pint of Young’s Winter Farmer and eating a home made pork pie in The King’s Arms looking at the cook-books I had bought in the Oxfam bookshop. I then made my way down the Cowley Road to my new favourite record shop to spend money I don’t have on too many CDs. Listening to one of them now. Syrian wedding day music. It just needs to be louder.

The mackerel will chase the sprats in on a falling tide. If the weather is calm you may see them boiling the water just off the rocks at the bottom of the garden, an unusual ruffling of the otherwise smooth surface and the occasional glimpse of a mackerels fin or tail caught for a second in the light.

As the tide goes down it creates small bays amongst the rocks and seaweed and there one day the sprats were driven in out of the deeper waters and became trapped amongst the dense tight floating brown of the seaweed that divides off the bay. A group of fifty or so seagulls gathered for the feast.  Some stalked the rocks, heads darting down through the weeds, coming up with a small silver fish a couple of inches long which disappeared before they went looking for more. Two Great Black-backed gulls strutted imperiously bullying the other smaller birds aside to get top picking, the rest mostly herring and common gulls. Half a dozen terns flitted through the air, dropping their wings and diving into the water and then up again in a flurry of white and water, up into the air to swallow their catch and then back down until another opportunity was spotted and then in and up again. They were there for almost two hours as the tide went down, the water for the sprats diminished and in their panic the few survivors could be seen jumping out of the water only to be snatched away until the water had gone with the sprats and the black weed hung wet and heavy against the rocks.

The gulls took their leave noisily pulling away back to Owen Island calling complaint to each other onwards again looking for more food.

Some of you find time to read these blatherings that some of the writing has been shaped up and published in a magazine that was called Fire & Knives. It was a food magazine with a difference in that there were no recipes and no adverts, just writing of one sort or other on and around the subject of food, cooking and eating.

Unfortunately, just over a week ago, I had an email to tell me the publication was no more. They were going to change the format to an annual event rather than a quarterly publication but unfortunately were not able to make it work.

In all I had four pieces in the magazine; two on mackerel, one on lobsters and one on shopping in Birkenhead. So a fair representation of some of the stuff I write about on here.

Apart from the odd bit in the legal press these were the first things I’ve had published. There are those who say I don’t smile often, well I smiled when the packages arrived with each of the magazines with my name in print. I even got round to smiling at the copies that arrived that did not have me in it.

Somewhere on this machine I have a couple of articles in half preparation for submission, including one going under the title Sharp knives, bleeding fingers and air guitars. I wrote down the title before writing the article but it was about the music I listen to when cooking and how to play air guitar with a very sharp knife without cutting your fingers. It can be done.

So this is by way of a small salute and thank you to Fire & Knives for being bonkers enough to put into print my musings on mackerel.