Is there any better sound on a Friday evening than a guitar that has been turned up too loud before being shredded through a knackered speaker before being turned up a little louder. If that same guitar is being given over to replicating some dodgy T-Rex riffs then happiness is mine. It doesn’t take much.

As the guitar made too much noise I cooked up a few lamb steaks. I had thought I would be cooking for at least one teenager but it turned they all thought they had better things to do. In the event all the teenage plans turned to nothing and they are now in lock down in their bedrooms complaining of being bored.

In the meantime once the lamb steaks were done I turned then in garlic, chopped red onion and cherry tomatoes. A handful of cooked giant couscous was stirred in together with some rocket before I sat to eat with guitars clanging in the distance.

I am a reluctant gardener. I am happier sitting back and admiring someone else’s handiwork  opposed to getting my hands dirty and trying to create order out of the chaos.

I can do the mindless destruction. Cutting things down in the hope they will grow back again next year. And I can dig a small hole in the ground, ease out a plant from a plastic black pot, put the plant in the hole in the expectation that nature will do the rest. After that I get a bit lost. Things don’t grow and the tasks are half carried out. I only need think about the six tomatoes I grew from the six plants I had in the greenhouse.

So this afternoon I set myself the task of trimming the hedge that runs down our half of the left hand, or right hand, side, depending on where you are standing, of the front garden. I started off knowing that no matter how much was trimmed the hedge was already so misshapen it would still look like a mess, albeit shorter, by the time I was done.

And so it proved. A tall ladder was extracted from the basement, a hedge trimmer was dug out of the garage and an hour and a half later I was left with a great pile of cuttings that needed to be cleared away and a hedge that look just as much of of a mess as it had when I started, only a little bit shorter.

The robin seemed happy. It pecked around in the ground after me until it found a fat green grub and it was off for its lunch.

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For our late lunch I am making more use of the harissa. I spent half an hour yesterday trying to find a recipe for a harissa flavoured beef stew and then I gave up figuring I could work it all out with what I had.

We had finished off the chicken I had cooked on Friday for Saturday’s lunch but the carcass was left in the fridge. I cooked it down to make a bright red and fierce stock.

As that cooked I fried off some pieces of fatty pork belly in the pan I had used this morning for frying bacon ( I have a death wish – I know), once they were browned, I did the same to some stewing steak.

I then sweated onions and garlic in a large pan until they were sweet. Cumin and caraway seeds were ground and stirred into the onions. The meat was tipped in and I cleared off the fatty residue in the bottom of the frying pan with some of the chicken stock. I stirred a good teaspoon of the harissa into the meat along with a tin of chopped tomatoes, the rest of the stock and then put the lid on and left it to putter for a couple of hours.

We ate it with potatoes from the garden, couscous and kale. Kale seems to be the only thing I can grow  (apart from garlic and horseradish) and we have a surfeit of it.

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I should have known. If you start on a recipe that is short on detail but includes the words ‘do not not put in the fridge otherwise they may collapse’ then you should know that how ever damn long it stays in the fridge it is bound to collapse. So it proved.

I picked up The Ivy Cookbook a couple of weeks ago for £2.50. It has been on the side ever since. Then this morning I thought I would make fish-cakes and it occurred to me that The Ivy would have a good recipe. I was right. It is so good that people complain if it is not on the menu.

I made a note of what would be required, including a bag of salmon tails from Wards  from which it transpires I buy my fish from the same place as the the bloke responsible for 7 Seconds to Midnight. From such things are comfortable nights sleep to be had.

In between choosing what to cook and the cook inning I had to spend two hours in a B & Q car-park waiting for the the AA to come along to help kick start a recalretent car. He spent a lot of time plugging in screws and undoing electrics without a great deal happening. As he was about to give up he said he was off to thump the petrol tank. To the surprise of us both this worked.

Back with the fish cakes – they started to sag as soon as they went into a pan to brown. This was despite the time they had been given to firm up in the fridge. Bad temper and general grudge followed them round for the rest of the evening. Despite  all that they tasted very good. But not as good as they would have tasted if they had kept their shaped and had been flavoured with Heinz, as opposed to someone else’s, tomato ketchup.

I should of course blame it all on The Ivy. I have a memory of eating there almost 30 years ago and as a starter I had a plate of oysters. They were very good oysters apart from one which had a smell about it as if it had been dragged up from a shit pit and wasn’t going back. The smell took my nose as I was swallowing it down. I spent the rest of the day, and the next day, waiting for the bad oyster to work its course through my insides.

Nothing happened. But I have kept a eat  wheathered eye on the The Ivy every since.

When a recipe blithely  tells you not to worry too much about how much stuff you are making as it will all keep for a week or so in the fridge you know you are storing up trouble ahead.

So it has come about with the harissa sauce I made two weeks ago.

There was plenty left over and I dutifully ladled into a pot and covered it with a thin layer of olive oil and put it to the back of the fridge. It has been there ever since. A dark, red, fiery presence. A blot on the conscience. It has been counting down the weeks until it develops a thin layer of mound and has to be thrown away. Last week I came across a pot of creme fraiche, use by date sometime in August, that had mould growing so thick and black it was pushing open the lid. ‘This could be me’, the harissa has been saying, ‘unless you pull your finger out and do something with me’.

That is all well and good for the harissa to say but it ignores the fact that it was, is, so hot and fiery that no one else in the family has the stomach for it. All this is compounded by the fact I made it with the two handfuls of chillies I was able to harvest from the garden.

This evening I had a go at it smeared over a small chicken that was roasted for an hour. It was still fiery and hot which may be sufficient for a troubling nights sleep.

We listened The National and got high on cheerleaders.