Four us went to a pub last. Gallagher’s Pub & Barbers just round the corner from Hamilton Square. It was well worth the visit. A narrow room with the bar towards the end and beyond that the barber shop. There was a blackboard with the list of the beers that they had on tap and a row of familiar badges on the pumps.

I started with a Hilbre Gold but the barrel was almost empty and the barman could only squeeze out half a pint before it sputtered and gave up. He gave me the half glass for free and I was well along the way to like the place. Next pump on the bar was badged with Salopian Oracle. The blackboard used the words hoppy and golden which sounded good to me so I went for that.

I may have said it before but it is worth repeating I would far rather a good pint of beer than the best glass of wine. This was one of those good pints. It did what it said on the blackboard with the hops adding the correct amount of bitter after taste although they some sweetness as well. Another truism on beer is that the high that you get as you finish your second pint and start on your third is better than any hard drug. I am not sure I felt particularly high but the good beer and talk eased away the detritus of what had been a bad day and gave the evening a better taste in the mouth.

Over the weekend they do cheese tasting evenings. I may have to nip down tomorrow night with one of the large quarters of Swiss cheese Steve gave me before Christmas.

Now late Saturday afternoon the fire is on and it is dark outside and the oxtail stew has been on the oven for an hour. It will be there for another few hours before we eat it with roast potatoes and a red cabbage that I am going to stew in cider and butter.

The oxtail is now cooking.

I bought a kilo pack last Saturday at The Farmer’s Market and put to it one side in the freezer for a few days. It came out last night to defrost.

This evening I took down the big orange Le Creuset and smeared in some olive oil and put it on a high heat. I cut open the plastic pack of oxtails and tipped them in with salt and copious ground black pepper. Some of them were as big as a fist, others the size of a curled thumb.  They sizzled and browned in the oil for ten minutes. I then threw in a chopped onion and let that cooked for another few minutes before turning the heat down to let it soften.

Five minutes later I tipped in some chopped garlic and turned up the heat before adding two tablespoons of plain flour. I stirred it all round with a wooden spoon and let the flour cook in the oil.

As that continued to cook I brought up from the basement the chicken stock I had made last Saturday evening and a bottle of red wine. Half the bottle went in and was brought to the boil before I covered the oxtails with the stock. Before turning down the heat and putting the lid on I put in two bay leaves and finely chopped parsley.

I will now leave it for a couple of hours until I am ready for bed. I will take it off the heat then and leave it in the basement until tomorrow evening. It will need another couple of hours tomorrow to cook through and we will eat it with roast potatoes.

Settling down now with a glass from the rest of the bottle of red.

There was another red sky this morning but there is no photo and still no snow. But it is cold clear and bright and I have been outside inspecting drains. The sink in the kitchen was full of greasy cold water that was not draining away. I bailed some out and spent fifteen minutes at it with a plunger but it was old and the wrong size although I was able to loosen some black gunk from under the plug the blockage was not moving.

So Galen and I went outside with a screwdriver and torch to lift the drain cover. There was nearly an accident as Galen was too busy practising kung fu moves in the dark to notice that the drain cover was up. Inside it was as clean as a whistle so I was going to have to try something more drastic. I fortified myself with 20 minutes of David Attenborough. Lots of nice music and pictures but I am damn sure that some years ago there was an almost identical programme on the Congo which featured the same elephants and their watering hole.

Cautiously I opened our readers Digest book on DIY. That told me to use the plunger. Done that. It didn’t work. The next step was to go under the sink and start unscrewing things with buckets to hand to catch the water. I peered under the sink and amongst the plastic pipes it looked as if there were things to unscrew but precious little room for a bucket. I improvised with a small saucepan starting with what I thought was the most innocuous looking thing to unscrew. I started on it and after a while a small drip of water started to leak out. I fully expecting this to turn into a great gush but nothing else happened. The screw was undone and in my hand and that came out was a small drip.

I could see that potentially this was going to take a while. I then remembered the pot of caustic soda hidden behind a shelf in the basement. I knew that it was bad stuff. But if it was bad stuff it might even work.

I worked my way through the child safety features and poured some of the granules down the plug hole. There was a slight fizz and a pop and the scud of water that was left in the bottom of the sink disappeared. Caustic soda is very scary stuff. I put it back in the basement feeling slightly guilty. There had been more things i could have unscrewed under the sink. Next time perhaps.

No cooking for me this evening but I ate a very good cheese souffle and I have taken the oxtails I bought at the farmers market out of the freezer to cook tomorrow night and eat on Friday.

In the meantime I have picked up again Stephen Lockwood’s book The Mackerel Its biology, assessment and the management of a fishery.

It is one of the few books on mackerel I have been able to find. Published in 1988 it provides a useful bit of background reading on the mackerel fisheries and some of their history around the British Isles. He says  that mackerel sized between 30 and 35 cm will produce between 255,000 and 405,000 eggs. Although some 99.9999% of the mackerel born from these eggs will not reached their first birthday some 3,000 million mackerel will join the stocks of mackerel each year.

He also describes a shoal of mackerel caught on sonar in 1974 off Cornwall which was up to five miles long, two miles wide and some 40 metres deep. It all boils down to a lot of mackerel. When you have that many fish coursing through the water I wonder that it doesn’t cause some kind of strange disturbance or wave on the surface.

There was a red sky this morning that flared through the black silhouette of the trees on the other side of the road. There was only a brief few seconds to admire it between opening the curtains having got dressed and going downstairs to get into the car and off to work.

By the time we had got to the flyover leading from Birkenhead to the tunnel entrance the bright flare of pink had diminished to a pale orange cloud that balled up over the sheds of Cammell Laird. Despite the warning no bad came of the day and the skies remained dry and clear although a bitter cold took hold in the early evening.

This evening I helped with the cooking and made a pesto sauce to go with half inch cubes of potato roasted in oil until crisp and pasta cooked for its last fee minutes with half a shredded cabbage. I made the pesto in the heavy stone pestle and mortar; crushing the garlic with rock salt to a paste followed by the handfuls of basil leaves and pine nuts. Once that was thick slurry I poured in olive oil to loosen and then thickened it up again with parmesan.

After an afternoon being told how to sell myself there was some satisfaction to be had in pounding the sauce together.

This kids all complained it tasted too sharply of garlic. No doubt we will all smell tomorrow.