I came across this song on the internet some years ago. I have tried to find it since with a view to piecing together where it might of come from but without any luck.

I like the idea of the mackerel coming into the bay being that one more grip at life. It would make a good name for a book.

And it is easy to forget that under the surface of the land there are any number of old graves hidden away. Drive through some of the back roads of the Mizen and there will be a sign that will take you to an old graveyard, stones hardly there and collapsing back into the green grass.

A description of the Cottage taken from the survey report prepared by W. Geoffrey Bannister of Glandore, dated 28^th January 1973, for the Goulds (from whom we bought the Cottage) before they purchased from Mrs Rachel Leigh-White. The address given for the Cottage was Reenacappul, Durrus, County Cork.

Main Room – originally two rooms, now combined living room and dining room; the plaster work is clearly old lime plaster with many hollow patches and is very rough….the flooring throughout the ground floor is rather rough concrete with a “Tintawn” covering throughout.

North West room – toilet with door onto the quay; frame of external door is rotten, completely at the feet of the frame; it was not possible to force the door open due to moisture expansion; the small window in this door does not appear to be closable (amateur workmanship).

South West room – bathroom; access to the traps and hot & cold water feeds was impossible owing to the complete panelling in of both lavatory and bath.

FIRST FLOOR

Consisting of a landing and two small double bedrooms; there is no access to the attic, and so the ceiling is not insulated or sealed; the one and only window in the West bedroom has rot in the cill; it would seem that all the windows are quite the same requiring skarfing new timber into the existing frame and adequate weather protection; general condition of the decoration is poor, most of the paint of the ceiling is peeling off.

EXTERNALLY

The two South facing ground floor windows are rotten both at the feet of the frames and the cills and should be replaced, similarly on the first floor; the South window of the kitchen is rotten at the base of the frames: it would seem sensible to form a French drain between the kitchen and the road; the North window to the living room has rot in the cill and feet of the frame; the original access door from the quay on the North side of the house is completely rotten at the feet of the frames, and it is recommended that, as this opening is now not used it be blocked up.

SERVICES

Mains electricity

Septic tank sewage disposal

The vendor, it is understood, is to provide a new bored well, pump and housing; there was some vagueness as to water storage.

A very rough estimate of costs for putting this house in order would be between £2,000 and £3,000.

We have made the sticky ginger cake twice now so maybe it is worth setting out the recipe for next time.

I have a childhood memory of ginger cake. It came in a green wrapper but having just spent 10 minutes with Google I can find no trace of it. If anyone reading this remembers let me know.

The recipe comes from the new food supplement that is part of The Guardian on a Saturday. I know that elsewhere there has been a debate as to how the supplement uses the work of food bloggers to fill itself up without much recompense. So there must be an irony of sorts if I now want to to write about one of the recipes I caught there. What sort of credit should I be giving them? Probably not much given that if we had followed the recipe to the letter we would have been left with not so much of a cake but more of a burnt muddy swamp.

Anyway here it is

• 250 gr of plain flour (not 25 gr!)
• 1 tsp mixed spice
• 3 tsp ground ginger
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 tsp of salt
• 285 ml of milk
• 1 egg
• 85 gr of butter
• 85 gr of treacle
• 85 gr of golden syrup
• 115 gr of caster sugar

Turn on the oven to a medium heat.

Sieve the flour, spice mix, ground ginger, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt into a mixing bowl. Stir in the milk and egg.

Gently melt the butter, treacle, syrup and sugar in a pan until all amalgamated and dense.

Remember one of the joys of making this is the treacle. We all have a tin of syrup in the back of a cupboard but how often do we get to use its darker more intense cousin. I need to find more things to make with it.

Pour the treacle and melted butter onto the dry ingredients and stir in well with a wooden spoon. Add the milk and egg and continue stirring until all has merged together. Indulge yourself and and dip in a finger and lick it.

Pour this mixture into a 900gr loaf tin which has been greased and lined with greasrproof paper.

Put this into the oven for about 45 minutes or until a skewer comes out clea.

Allow to cool then eat. It will taste better a day or two later having been wrapped up in foil.

I had nothing to do with the making. Cora did it all although we both got to lick the bowl. I think some stem ginger chopped up would go well with it.

These are the dog days of February. The light filling out but still too cold to do much outside.

I had caught a quick twenty minutes yesterday afternoon to dig over roughly the rest of the veg patch so this afternoon I thought I would dig out the compost.

This a once a year occasion. We keep a bin in the kitchen for vegetable waste. It gets filled with old teabags, banana skins, apple cores, potato peel and all the general dross that gets thrown away in the kitchen. Once a week I take it out to the end of the garden and tip it out into a green bin. Every few weeks I give the mix a stir. This only disturbs the worms but if there is a child watching they enjoy the squirming mass of of pink white worms being turned over.

All the worms produce something. A dense heavy pungent soil that lies at the bottom of the green bin. We dug it out this afternoon and spread it over the veg patch. The worms seemed to be shocked at being out in the cold air and turned down back into the soil dragging their goodness with them. There were odd bits that had not been digested, avocado stones, mango pips and small blue elastic bands. We picked the bits out and threw them back into the bin for next year.

After that hard work out in the cold we came in to make a ginger cake from the same recipe used a few weeks ago and hit exactly the same mistakes as last time – why only 25gr of flour did it really need to be in the oven for an hour and half. This time we negotiated by memory and instinct and it came out fine.

Having made it we put it to one side whilst we ate the fish pie.