Is there any more melancholy time of year than the few days after Christmas when all the noise and bright lights have come to an end and children are moving away.

There has been talk about our taking the tree down early but I have resisted the temptation. Outside the weather is so resolutely wet that any excuse not to go outside is desirable, and the tree, three weeks on, is still a magnificent beast.

Sometimes a tree will take on a forlorn air about itself now. Not this one. It is still almost grazing the ceiling and it seems a shame to take it outside to be converted into firewood. So it will stay put for another few days.

By way of a goodbye we went into Liverpool late yesterday afternoon. Walking through the crowds it seemed that notwithstanding the excess of Chistmas there is still plenty of money to be spent.

Not wanting to miss out I slipped into Probe and picked a re-release of an old Lee Hazelwood album and a compilation of film music written by a Russian composer called Mikael Tariverdiev. The film music is particularly fine and seems to be fitting well into the post Christmas whistfulness. It is mostly from the 1960s- 1970s. The pieces are short with lots of accordions, mid -European waltzes and ballads sung in strange voices. A bit like an out of kilter Tom Waits. Every home should have a copy.

We then moved onto Oxfam where I was pleased to be able to pick up a fine copy of Roald Dahl’s Cookbook published in 1991.

With this in hand we made our way to Roya de Pinchos and spent an hour or so gorging ourselves some more on the balls of cream cheese, slices of good bread with cheese, quince paste and chorizo and pieces of toasted bread with pork loin, prawns oand pieces of flash fried steak. The major disappointment was the lack of quail egg to go with toasted mushrooms.

Late Sunday afternoon now and it has been wet all day. It is darkening outside and the house is quieter now apart from the sound of Russian film soundtracks.

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Almost ten years ago now I went for a long weekend to Porto. It had either just been or was about to be a European city of culture. It had about it those characteristics of the few other cities of culture I know (Liverpool, Cork and Glasgow;  faded grandeur and time gone to seed.

We went in February and although it was cool we sat out one afternoon having a drink in a square and could feel the heat in our faces.

On the Saturday evening we came across a record shop of sorts and I picked up 5 or 6 CDs of fado music, most of which were chosen on the basis of the picture on their cover.

Later that evening we found ourselves in a bar in the top room of a house on a square up from the river. There was a group of students sat at one of the few other tables and a girl sang.

There is always a layer of melancholy that lies over the start of a new year. So we have spent the day listening those half dozen CDs I picked up in Porto.

A sad bit of news from the summer was that The Good Things Cafe would be closing in Durrus.

It has been a fixed part of our visits to the Sheep’s Head for the last eleven years.

When we first drove through Durrus back in 1999 the building the Cafe went on to occupy was a butterfly house. We thought we might go that first year but the butterfly house closed and the building stood empty for a couple of years.

It looked unprepossessing when the Cafe first opened and we drove past a few times unsure as to whether we would be going.

So I think that the first time we ate there was in the summer of 2003 and if I remember it right we ate there twice. Once in the early evening with kids, sat outside, with the sun going down and the kids played on the grass. I can’t remember what we ate but I am fairly sure that the Durrus Cheese Pizza and Fish Soup were involved. The two of us went back a few days later, having found a baby sitter, and sat inside.

After that we have eaten there at least two or three times every year.

In 2004 we celebrated two 40th birthdays and one 7th birthday. Another year we walked the back road from Ahakista to Durrus for an Easter Sunday lunch. The walk took about three hours and having finished our lunch we then walked all the way back again.

The only thing that ever let us down was the weather when we chose to eat outside. One summer we had two lunches outside and the sun beat down so fiercely we were fighting over umbrellas for the small amount of shade that they gave. Two years after that we had to eat outside because there was no room inside the cafe. We misjudged the weather and it started to rain but we continued to eat in the damp.

The meals have always been with family and friends.

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And the food has always been good.

A large part of that goodness has come from the fact that the food was either grown or caught within a few miles of were we were sat eating. The lobsters and shrimp came from Tommy in Ahakista and the salads and herbs came from Clovis Ferguson and Gubbeen and the potatoes always came from Kilcrohane.

Somewhere upstairs I have a box that contains a fair number of the bills I picked up at the end of the meals we ate there.If I were to go through it and try to work out the most popular dishes we ate I imagine that towards the top would come the fish soup and gazpacho, followed quickly by the crab tart and Durrus Cheese Pizza; but they would be chased by the duck wings with noodles and the Sugar Club steak, the Grower’s Plates and the dish I had one year of potatoes, tomatoes and onions roasted with hake. And there were the Gubbeen Ham open sandwiches and the tarts made with blue cheese and pecans and the small plates of Ahakista prawns and a Nicoise Salad I had one year with the most perfectly cooked hard boiled eggs.

Sometimes we went there swearing blind to bide our pennies and stick to just the one course and no pudding. Those resolutions would be broken as soon as we say down and there would always be puddings, rich and indulgent; vast, fat meringues, banoffee pies and liquorice ice cream. I always had a small pot of St. Emillion chocolate made with a hint of brandy.

They helped me to celebrate my 50th birthday last year by coming to the Cottage and cooking up 30 or so lobsters for us to eat sat on the lawn looking out over the Bay and this last year Kristen and Keiron worked there for the summer.

I am sure that we will cope with the Good Things Cafe not being down the road and that over the course of the next few years we will make it over to Skibbreen where they will be making their new home.

In the meantime it seems right to be saying thank you to Carmel and her cooking and those others that have cooked and served, for the good food that we have eaten over the course of the last eleven years in the old butterfly house on the road out from Durres.