Jesus that man Goode had a thing about padlocks. By the day he came to sell, when was it you came, 1998, there was not a door in the place that did not have its own padlock. By that time he had finished working and he had time to be here a month or six weeks over the summer. When they were here they spent most of the time at The Cottage and I heard him say, ‘The longer you are here the less reason there seems to be to go anywhere else.’

But when they left for a time then every door and gate had its own padlock and was shut up against the world.

I had heard it that it started when he first bought the place from Mrs Rachel Leigh-White. Now she’d had it since 1945 and had bought it off a family called Boyle. She bought all of the land and then it was called Reenacapaul and it included The Butter House across the road and Jack’s Cottage down the road there and some of the fields that run up to the back. The Boyle’s used to farm them and they kept some cows. Mrs Rachel Leigh-White sold bits off over the years but she always kept The Butter House and there was a Mrs Boyle, who had been a daughter of the family, she lived there and she kept house for The Cottage.

Inside The Cottage there was feck to live on, there was no proper water or electricity and nothing to make your food on. I believe that Mrs Leigh-White liked the idea of her living rough knowing that Mrs Boyle was just across the road there to bring her her food. Feck it must have wet when it was raining and Mrs Boyle had to walk across the road keeping some plates warm for the lady.

And if Mrs Leigh-White was away then Mrs Boyle would look after the place and then there was no need for padlocks and there wasn’t a house here that had any sort of lock on its door.

But then there was a week when Mrs Leigh-White was away in Cork to sign papers and Mrs Boyle was called away into Bantry for a few days. She came back to open the place up and let in some air and there was a man asleep in one of the beds. She left him snoring and came up here for a man to sort him out. They woke him with a shout but they were gentle with him.

He was Mad Tom Tobin, he was one of those men who walked the roads back then, they would stop for a while in a place and play some music on a whistle and that might give them some beer and a shed to sleep in before moving on to the next place and after a few days they’d be off and it’d maybe they’d be back the following year.

Tom had been up in Kilcrohane for a few days and was then making the walk on to Durrus. He said the rain had come down and to get out of sleeping in a ditch he’d slipped through the front door into the empty place and it had been so many years since he’d seen a bed that he got into that. Well he went on his way and the sheets were cleaned and that should have been it.

But Mrs Boyle started to worry on those other times she’d been in Bantry for a night and Mrs Leigh-White had been away and the place had been left for the night and the different turns in the sheets on the beds after she was back.

She kept quiet on it but on her next trip to Bantry she bought a padlock for the door by the kitchen for those nights when she was gone. She must have told something to Mrs Leigh-White because she was dead by the time the place was sold. But John Goode would say that he had been warned about unauthorised visitors and he’d warn that it was best to keep a lock on the place.

But over the years he would worry on that story from Mrs Boyle and the man who had crept in and slept in one of the beds. He would think that if that could happen over a few nights people were away from the place what liberties could be had when there was no-one  for two months. So he was down at Wiseman’s buying more padlocks. He had so many that the bedrooms themselves had a lock on the door. All that for the one night that Tom Tobin wanted to keep out of the rain.

Lunch today was four lamb cutlets from Edge’s the butchers in New Ferry on the way back from picking younger daughter up from Cheshire oaks.

After the red wine of last night I needed something spicy and meaty to eat. I made a rub by crushing a teaspoon of cumin seeds with rock salt and pepper corns. This was massaged into the nuggets of meat whilst I cleaned off the bits of squid from the griddle. As I did this the kitchen was again filled with the smell of scorched squid.

A bit of oil then went on the griddle and I cooked the lamb so there were black ridges on both sides and it was still pink in the middle. The salt cumin and pepper had just the right kick.

The afternoon was spent in the garden. Things are starting to grow in the greenhouse despite the recent cold and there was time to lie flat out face up to the sun and doze for a few minutes.

As those who have been there will know one of the very good things about The Good Things Cafe is the selection of good cook books they have on the shelves which you can browse on your way to the loo and buy at the end of your meal. Plan things carefully and you can buy the book that contains the recipe that gave rise to the meal you have just had. Something I was able to do some years ago with ducks legs and noodles which now appears in Carmel Somer’s own book but which roughly derived from a recipe for a ragout of duck legs in a book called The Cooking of South-West France by Paula Wolfert. It is now a Friday night favourite if I am cooking for myself and spot some duck legs in the chiller in Sainsbury’s.

One of the favourite books I have bought from there is called Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons. The sub-title will tell those who know me why I like it Enchanting Dishes from the Middle East, Mediterranean and North Africa. 

Last week on Sunday whilst we were having our Easter lunch I spotted a couple of new Diane Henry books, there was one on preserving food and another called Food from Plenty. Having had a good lunch and a few glasses of wine I leaved through it and spotted a few recipes I thought I would enjoy cooking so I bought it.

We ate from it last night, griddled squid with chickpeas, peppers and chermoula. It was delicious.

Most of the ‘cooking’ for the meal came out of either a tin or a jar. I went to Lunya over lunch and bought a selection; roast red peppers stuffed with prawns, mushrooms and partridge, octopus , smoked mackerel and two jars of plump and bulbous el Navarrico chickpeas.

So for the starters it was mostly a question of opening a tin and depositing the contents neatly on a plate. The only cooking I did was to fry in olive oil some finely diced potato which I mixed in with the octopus. I also sliced a salami from The Gubbeen Smokehouse.

We had picked up a kilo of cleaned squid from Ward’s earlier in the day. This was chopped into large chunks and lightly scored. I then put the chickpeas in a bowl and mixed in olive oil, ground cumin, hot paprika, a chopped red chilli and finely chopped parsley and coriander. The recipe called the roasting of red peppers but I had picked up a jar of el Navarrico whole piquillo peppers preserved in their own juices from Lunya so I just threw that into the mix.

The squid were cooked on a very hot grill for 30 seconds or so until the pieces were charred at the edges and started to curl. As they cooked they were added to the chickpeas in the bowl. Just before serving I stirred in some lime juices. We ate it with smoke billowing round the house from the griddle.

For pudding we had a selection of Irish cheeses (Smoked Gubbeen, Milleen and Durrus) with a bowl of pears that had been baked with honey. Another recipe suggested from the Diane Henry book.

We listened to a lot of John Grant.

All in all a vary good Friday night meal.

On Monday we drove to Schull and parked by the old broken down church and graveyard on the Colla Road. On the wall around the graveyard Cork County Council had put up a sign warning against the dangers of illicit digging of graves. The sign made it clear that the Council would accept no liability for any injuries caused by grave digging activities and that for the avoidance of doubt this included those engaged in voluntary grave digging.

Helpfully guidance was given as to how one should go about having a grave dug and who one needed to contact for the digging of a lawful grave where there would be no danger to life and limb.

Inside the church rubbish had blown in with the wind, and trees and ivy grew through the rusted metail railing that made up some of the old graves.

We moved on from the pier down the road and the sea and the stretch of water that separated the mainland from Long Island. As we turned the corner to start walking along the coast heading west the wind was behind us cold and blustery. The water was choppy and grey and the white houses that clustered on Long Island looked alone and somewhere away from the world.

At Colla Pier there were a few boats which had a collapsed look about them beaten up by winter and the weather waiting for the heat of the sun. They were streaked with brown and the colour was bleached out of them. We followed the walk round cutting back through the hills. In their shadow some of the force of the wind was diminished but as we got to the top of the hill overlooking the church and Schull harbour it came at us in full force blowing the air out of our lungs. The harbour was empty of boats. At one point I looked back and through the shadow of the hills there was a glimpse of The Sheep’s Head grey in the distance.

We walked quickly down the hill and bundled into the car to be off for lunch. Hackett’s was open and we sat down at the large table opposite the bar and set about ordering our food as pints were poured and bottles of Coke put on the table. I have been to Hackett’s a few times over the years and somewhere I have a t-shirt to prove it. I don’t think I have ever seen the same person behind the bar but whoever it is they seem to own the place and there will be a conversation about the night before and how late it was before the doors were finally closed.

There was a sign behind the bar spelling out the opening and closing a times over the Easter break “We are open when the door can opened otherwise we are shut.” The barman wore a very fine Captain Haddock t-shirt and I was tempted to ask him where he had got it from.

The food was a good if not better than ever. I had a BLT sandwich made with thick slabs of Gubbeen bacon and a great pile of salad. The others had bowls of soup and toasties and in the case of one another bowl of soup as he was still hungry. Two of the children did not want there salad so I ended up polishing off three great portions.

Having finished lunch we spilled out onto the Main Street and walked up and down. Two thick slices of steak and a bag of potatos were bought for supper and almost an hour was spent choosing books in the bookshop.