Thursday evening was bonfire night and we went to watch our fireworks in Birkenhead Park. We had to wait for an hour for the fireworks to start. With the rain that had been coming down all day it could have been a case of damp matches. There were a few thousand people gathered round in a great circle to watch. For most of the hour all we could see were a few men in high visibility jackets waving torches and the green light of mini lasers sweeping round blinding the odd passer by. There were plenty for fireworks in the distance but none in Birkenhead Park.

As we waited one the children started to complain and worry about the cold and her homework that apparently still needed to be done. She kept counting diown the minutes before she would be off storming up the hill to be home but then halfway through one of her minutes the fireworks started and the sky erupted into light. She was quiet then but behind us a far younger child decided that he needed to be home in bed and a long way from all the loud bangs. He wailed all the way through. A high pitch moan of “I don’t like it I want to go home”.

The fireworks were still pretty good.

Saturday morning and slightly unexpectedly I found myself giving advice on the proper construction of a chestnut roaster. I was in the grocers and Kazim had had a go trying out his new roaster earlier that morning. He had not been able to get it hot enough and the chestnuts had taken too long to cook.

I peered at it as if peering into the bonnet of an unfamiliar car, I poked at the metal and put my fingers to the holes that had been punched into the metal fire pit on legs and the round sheet metal lid.

“It needs more holes” I said as if there was a danger I knew what I was talking about. “It needs more holes and they need to be bigger”.

Kazim and I stroked our chins and discussed the merits of gas against charcoal and the cooking time for chestnuts. He hopes to have a better go of it next week. In the meantime a small pressure cooker bubbled behind us – a lunch of stewed onions and tomatoes.

Saturday afternoon and we spent twenty minutes in a dark room watching a naked marble statue talk us through her starkersness lips and eyes fluttering light as she clothed and undressed herself and her soft voice went on, asking us questions about what we were watching. We were in the Williamson Gallery and almost missed what we had come to see – mostly because we didn’t have much idea of what it was. It transpired it was a light projection onto the marble statue that made her eyes and lips move as she spoke. There was something spooky about being in the room with her. She kept perfectly still but the flickering light brought her to life and it felt as if there was someone else in the room with us. I hope they don’t turn her off at night and she can continue talking after we have all gone home.

Sometimes it is difficult to know what to do out in the garden. I had an hour or so out there this afternoon.

In anticipation I had spent some time in bed through the morning turning over in my mind what tasks were out there to be done. As I lay I also took it upon myself to wonder why my tomatoes had done so badly whilst the chillies had done so well. Looking back at it at the end of the day it appeared that the chilli crop next to the tomato crop had won out about 10 to 1.

There were plenty of leaves to be swept up and I duly did a bit of that. They were tipped into a large bag to be left for the next few months until turned into mulch. But looking up at the trees there were still as lot mores leaves to come down and it was difficult to summon up enthusiasm for a task knowing that no sooner was it done then it would be needed to be done again.

The beds are still heavy with the foliage of summer. I spent some time clearing that but a lot of it was still green and in the warmth that had gathered under the fog it felt too early to be hacking everything back. From the bits that I did chop back I disturbed a frog. It had obviously grown since the summer and had me jumping back as it scuttled out from where it had been hiding.

The hour or so’s worth of gardening done I made supper. A sweet sour curry of chicken with spices and dried apricot. The best thing about it was being able to make use of the packet of Jaggery sugar that has been on the side in the kitchen for the last six months. I had obviously  bought it for something and then promptly forgotten to use it. Arguably sugar would have done just as well but it did add a heft of sweetness to the roasted spices.

The best thing about roasting the spices was tipping them into the mortar and taking in the arid smell they gave off as I crushed them with the pestle.

Yesterday at the grocers I saw that Kazim had taken out the window at the front allowing the shop to spill out onto the pavement facing Oxton Road and then back inside the shop the colours crossing over from one side to the other.

Kazim  told me his plans for next Saturday. He has a friend,  a welder, and he had made him a stand out of metal to roast chestnuts on. Kazim is going to set it up outside the shop in the middle near from where the window had been taken out. He wasn’t hoping to make any money but he thought it would be a good way to bring people into the shop and to make the area more interesting.

We discussed if there were any recipes for cooking roast chestnuts beyond heating them up in a pan with holes over hot charcoal. He had heard that the French have a way of letting them stew in red wine and then splitting them before they went on to roast. We agreed that it would be best to keep it simple.

So if you are near Birkenhead next weekend you should go along for a bag of roast chestnuts. I am sure they will be good.

This morning, Sunday, the world has been shrouded in fog. It has soaked up whatever sound there is and all is quiet apart from the tapping of keyboards. The trees are yellowing and shedding their leaves and it feels like the first proper day of autumn. Maybe we will light a fire this evening.

In the meantime is has been a good morning for eating bacon, drinking coffee and thinking about The Unthanks.

So with all this technology we have at our fingertips I found myself at 11.00 last night shouting loudly at a blank laptop screen that was refusing to do what only a week or so ago it had done without me really thinking about it. The small revolving ball waiting to happen seemed to be shrugging its shoulders and telling me, “What else should you expect if you go download an upgrade when you don’t know what you are doing and I am too old and tired now to run with all its bright new colours.”

I left it and went to bed and when I woke up it had got round to doing what I had asked it to do.

I took out some of the frustration on the cats ushering them outside for another night in the cold and rain.

They should count themselves lucky they are not dogs. I have found a recipe for dog.

Any trip to Oxford needs to fit in a quick ten minutes in a second hand bookshop to try and find an interesting cookbook. The good people of Oxford seem to be more than happy to pass on cookbooks interesting and quirky. This weekend I managed to pick up a book devoted to vanilla, another on stimulants and intoxicants and finally a book on Korean cuisine.

I have been told by people that know that I should be having a go at Korean cuisine and there is a small hole in the wall place in Liverpool that looks tempting.

I picked up the book without really giving it much thought. It is mostly a fairly scholarly treatise on the food and its history but at the back there are twenty five or pages of recipes including one for Dog-meat stew or Kaejang-guk.

I read the recipe expected that there might be a suggested substitute for the dog-meat. There wasn’t – instead it started with a clear instruction requiring 800g of dog meat but no instruction on where to acquire it. Reading more closely dogs are bred specially for the soup which is particularly good in the summer. But there was little clue to the type and size of dog presumably leaving the adventurous chef free have a go at whatever might be at hand be it the noisy pug that lives next door or a wandering labrador.

Happily the recipe starts by telling us that ‘dog meat is generally cooked with the skin intact, trim any fur and clean thoroughly. Often, fur is burnt off the skin with a flame’!

Fortunately I have another book of Korean cooking and from that I am cooking some chicken thighs braised in soy sauce.

It was very easy. The thighs were steeped for an hour or so in a mixture of soy sauce and sesame oil with some crushed garlic and ginger, spring onions and shame seeds and a dash of sugar.

The thighs were fried in oil until they took on colour and the marinade was stirred in along with a cupful of water. Twenty five minutes later it was done. A diced red pepper was thrown in and I ate with plain boiled rice listening to dodgy 1970’s reggae.

I suspect that will be better for my nights sleep!