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.

Rather to my surprise I found myself listening to Tom Waits this evening. We were about to eat and I wanted to put something on we could listen to for the meal. i leafed through the CD’s and there was a copy of Asylum Years I had almost forgotten I had.The vinyl version is one of the first albums I bought. I can remember it now going through the racks in Penny Lane records in chester and being frustrated that there were three or four albums i was going tp have to leave behind.

Those were the days you could discover someone new and then find there was a back catalogue to be scoured for and discovered. I have all the records now but I am not fully convinced I have got to grips with all of Tom Waits’ back catalogue. The memory is more in the places and times I have listened to them al and the people that were there with me.

But mostly Tom Waits has been about being sat in a room by myself and listening to the music tease its way out. That’s no more so than on Kentucky Avenue. I have been listening to the song for twenty five years and I still don’t quite know hat it is about but for the tumble of words which catch up short.

I then I find myself listening to it and all I want to is close my eyes and cut off the spokes from my wheelchair and put on a pair of magpie wings and then maybe I can find myself.