Seven for lunch so we had falafel, lamb and stuffed pitta and flat Arab bread.

The food came from either the grocer on Oxton Road or The International Store. The falafel came out of a pack which came with its own scoop for shaping the small patties before they were dropped in hot oil. They are very easy to make. Simply pour the granular powder into a bowl and then stir 100 ml of water for each packet used then leave for an hour.

The mixture seems too wet to be able to hold its shape in the hot oil but somehow it does and they came out about an inch across, crispy and light.

I fried off the lamb at the same time. Chunky chops on the bone seasoned with salt, pepper and a touch of cayenne. I pulled all the nuggets of meat from the bone and piled them into a bowl for the table.

We ate it with slices of carrot, red onion, tomatoes, roasted red pepper and yogurt and hot chilli sauce.

One of the dishes I cooked on Saturday night was a small bowl of ox-tail stew. There was some left and three days latter it was perfectly unctuous.

The stew itself was very simple to make. A small pack of ox-tail pieces from Wards was all that I needed. The rest came from the cupboard.

I fried off the pieces of ox-tail in olive oil and added a chopped onion, carrot and garlic and fried it off some more. At that point I could have stirred in a spoon-full of flour but I forgot and just tipped in a half bottle of red wine. There were some pieces of chopped tomatoes on the side so I threw those in as well and then seasoned with salt and pepper. That was all left on a low heat for three hours until the meat was falling away from the bone. I boiled off some of the sauce before we ate it.

There were four pieces of ox-tail left and I finished them off this evening warming them up slowly in a pan on the hob. By the time they were heated through the sauce had turned into a dark, almost black, syrup that clung to the pieces of thick pasta I ate with it. I was very good indeed.

So for lunch today I again went in search of something that would keep some of of the family happy some of the time.

When I announced that it was going to be a form of chilli there were mutters of discontent. I was allowed to carry on so long as the rice did not have black bits in.

So we ate Mexican tinga poblana taken from Diane Henry’s Food from plenty.

We almost had the highlight of the meal before most of the cooking was done. A chorizo sausage peeled, crumbled and then fried in bacon fat until crispy. There were children crowding round asking for another bit. The sausage was crispy with all of the taste.

The sausage that survived went into a large pan and then in the  frying in pan in which I had cooked the sausage I fried off in batches a cubed shoulder of pork. As the batches took on sufficient colour they each went into the large pan with the sausage.

I then fried off two chopped onions. As they softened I stirred in some ground cumin and garlic and that all went into the large pan as well together with sufficient chicken stock to cover (the large chicken from last weekend still giving).

The large pan then went onto the hob to simmer for a while,

In the meantime the oven had been on high and inside a kilo of halved tomatoes with some sugar, salt and pepper had been roasting and browning.

The dish came together when I poured the tomatoes and their juice into the large pan with the softening pork and stirred in some chilli.

We ate it with soured cream, rice and sliced avocado. A despite the misgivings the kids ate at least some of it.

The curtains were closed again in the pub but this evening the men had been cheered by a change in the weather. It had started to rain rain the previous night and had continued through the day. It was a thick heavy rain that came down in sheets. It scoured the loose earth from the hills and ran down to the sea turning the water a dirty brown. The streams ran full and the roads were slick with it.

The men had walked through it to get to the pub and their coats and hats were piled up in a chair. It was warm in the pub and with the wet brought in by the men there was a heavy fug in the air. It smelt of the rain, the moisture coming off the coats and the heat rising from the men and their jumpers as they sat in their corner.

There were eight of them again. The man with the black beard was stood by the bar and in front of him was a silver bucket filled with a dozen mackerel. They were large, heavy and sleek. Their colours took off from the metal and the sharp light overheard, grey, silver, blue and green and then as the eye passed over them pink and yellow.

The men sat round the table were talking and their faces bent in to each other the talk bubbling through them. No-one mentioned the mackerel but they all knew they were there. They acted as a quiet reproach to the talk that had gone on the night before.

A man could catch mackerel in February al that you needed was a desire to be at them and the right piece of sparkle on your hook.

‘So was it wet out there?’ Tom Cronin asked him.

‘Feck you know it was wet. If it is raining here on the ground it will be raining out there on the water and on the water the rain has further to fall so it comes down harder. You know that as I do. But if you are in the boat what difference does some rain make. So long as you don’t fall in you’re as wet out of the water as in. But you will be wanting to know where and how I went about catching them.’

‘You have to look at the water in the rain and see how it flattens out and goes straight. I think the fish like the sound of it. I looked out over the boat and I could see them there in the water rising up as if the rain was food from the sky. There were hundreds of them out there. There was no quickness about them and it was if they were rising to the surface to be close to the sound of the water.’

‘I put my line in the water there, just feather and hooks, and I could drag it through the water through where they sat and there was not one fish that would have a go at it. They were big fish, big like those in the bucket but they were not wanting to take a bite. So I let the line drag in the water and and I looked about me for something I could put on a hook to catch their eye.’

‘When you are out there on the water like that there is feck all in your pockets that is going to help. I had some coins and an old bottle top that had been in there for a month and nothing else. There wasn’t much to be catching fish with with that.’

He grinned then. ‘ A mackerel when its mind is set to it will eat anything but if the fish isn’t hungry then there is no persuading it. These fish weren’t hungry and they weren’t going to be caught by the flash of some silver in the water. Watching the hooks and the feathers it was almost as if the fishes were blind and nothing was catching their eye. So I pulled out the hooks and cut off the feathers and then rubbed each hook through something that smelt.’

‘I’m not going to stand here now and tell you what it was. But you know that a mackerel’s nose is as quick as its eye and if there is something there to catch at them they’ll bite even if there is no silver in the water.’

He looked down into the bucket. ‘These fish they smelt and they got caught. You can help yourselves if you want. They’ll all be good to eat even if it is only February.’