I have a recipe for cormorant. Despite the lack of use it will have in the Cottage I set it out here:-

Having shot your cormorant, hold it well away from you as you carry it home; these birds are exceedingly verminous and the lice are said to be not entirely host-specific. Hang up by the feet with a piece of wire, soak in petrol and set on fire. This treatment both removes most of the feathers and kills the lice. When the smoke has cleared away, take the cormorant down and cut off the beak. Send this to the local Conservancy Board who, if you are in the right area, will give you 3/6d. or sometimes 5/- for it. Bury the carcase, preferably in a light sandy soil, and leave it there for a fortnight. This is said to improve the flavour by removing, in part at least, the taste of rotting fish. Dig up and skin and draw the bird. Place in a strong salt and water solution and soak for forty-eight hours. Remove, dry, stuff with whole unpeeled onions – the onion skins are supposed to bleach the meat to a small extent, so that it is very dark brown instead of being entirely black. Simmer gently in sea-water, to which two tablespoons of chloride of lime have been added, for six hours. This has a further tenderising effect. Take out of the water and allow to dry, meanwhile mixing up a stiff paste of methylated spirit and curry powder. Spread this mixture liberally over the breast of the bird. Finally roast in a very hot oven for three hours. The result is unbelievable. Throw it way. Not even a starving vulture would eat it.

From W.M.W. Fowler’s Countryman’s Cooking. Fowler also has useful things to say about the cooking and eating of crab.  After talking of the tedious business of picking all the meat out of the shell and claws. The proper cookery books will tell you all the weird and wonderful bodge-ups you can make with the result of your labours. Me – I’d send for Lettie!

Almost 25 years ago I went on a family holiday to Tuscany. We stayed in a series of two villas in the hills outside of Sienna and it was the first time I saw flat leafed parsley. I celebrated my 25th birthday there and drank too much Dutch Ginever the night before over a barbecue where we ate proper Italian sausages that were thick with meat.

On the evening of my birthday we ate at a nearby restaurant. We sat outside and they produced a special throne like chair for me to sit in and the food came in waves to the table. There was no menu to choose from and we just left it to our hosts to produce the food and bring it to the table. It was one of those meals that would be good to go back to to taste again.

I still have and use every day the chopping board I was given that birthday. It is worn now and slightly concave with the years of having a sharp knife pressing down on its surface. I also still have the great steel pan that I bought from a market stall in Sienna.

When we were there I used it to cook chicken with a tomato and red wine sauce. The recipe came from a book called A Table in Tuscany written and illustrated by Leslie Forbes. For some reason a copy of the book was there in the villa. I can remember buying the chickens with their heads and feet still on. They were chopped up and cooked in the steel pot with the red wine that was delivered to the front door of the villa each morning.

Here’s a thing. I found a long lost t-shirt this weekend.

I can last remember wearing it almost three years ago on a long weekend to Ahakista. There are photos of me with it on near the top of Rosskerrig and later having a restorative pint at Eileen’s Bar in Kilcrohane. But a few weeks later as I was packing for the summer holiday I could not find the t-shirt. I pulled the bedroom apart at least two times to try get to the corner it had hidden itself in and asked suspicious questions of the rest of the family but all with no luck.

There has been a simmering resentment ever since and last week I was still thinking on how much I missed that t-shirt.

Well it turned up last night. As the sun was out I decided to wear a particularly garish and unpleasant shirt that features some views of The Grand Canyon. I took the shirt off its hanger and found the t-shirt underneath.

The rest of the family did not share my happiness and relief.

Last night we went to Kevin and Julie’s for a BBQ.

There were blue skies again although the weather clouded over briefly before the sun came out again in the early evening still allowing some heat as it played out behind the trees..

We ate prawns with garlic mayonnaise and fresh bread, chicken and sausages, a potato salad with more mayonnaise and tuna and great pavlova. We finished off Kevin’s Sloe Gin and watched attempt to immolate Harry on the brazier. They stoked it up with pieces of dried yew that flared up against the darkening sky.

As the sun went down it got colder and we gathered our jumpers around us to keep warm.