I should have known that assembling a hammock on a sunny Saturday would lead to rain on the Sunday.

And so it came to pass. When we woke up this morning the sky was grey and heavy with cloud and the the ground was slick with rain and the hammock too damp to lie in.

No matter we have friends coming round for a late lunch and now mid-afternoon the sun is making an effort to break through the clouds.

There will be a Greek influence with both the guests and the food although we will be starting with the pure English of a large plate of freshly cooked asparagus slathered in butter with hard boiled duck eggs.

Having feasted on that we will be eating chicken cooked with honey, coffee and brandy. I have in the past cooked something similar with beef.

The recipe comes from a book I was given earlier this year The Olive and the Caper: Adventures in Greek Cooking by Susanna Hoffman.

The combination of flavours works surprisingly well. The coffee and honey work off each other to create a deep sweet taste bolstered by cinnamon, bay and cloves. We will eat it with a large bowl of crusty rice and salad from the garden.

To follow that we have a box of mangos to eat. I have just taken the lid off them and had a smell. Who needs perfume when you can have a smell like that.

Listening new wave funk and modern day psychedelia.

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It would be nice to think that some of the youth might be galvanised by the prospect of another five years of the Conservatives to create something is good as The Slits or The Gang of Four.

At the start of the summer it is always a good idea to pick on a salad that will be the default salad for next few months. The one you know that will be good and will go well with whatever might have been thrown on the barbeque.

In previous years it has been a chickpea salad and a roast aubergine salad. This year we seem to going for a Turkish chopped from the Morito cookbook.

It is a mixture of cucumber, radishes, cherry tomatoes and red onion all chopped up into small chunks and stirred together with some finely chopped parsley, mint and rocket. The seasoning comes from half a dozen pickled Turkish peppers, a squashed clove of garlic, lemon juice and olive oil.

We had it on Thursday night and we are having it again tonight with lamb chops cooked on the barbeque, yogurt and flat bread.

This Monday evening we had the remains of the best part of a roast chicken to finish off.

We ate it with fried potatoes, salad from the garden and a pungent green dressing cribbed from a Diane Henry book.

The dressing was made up of all the anchovy fillets I could find in the fridge (a total of five – a couple extracted from a jar and the rest from a couple of opened tins), a small handful of capers, a small bunch of parsley, basil and mint, a couple of cloves of garlic and the juice of a lemon. This was all put into a blender and as I pulsed it I poured in enough olive oil to turn it into a thick sauce. It didn’t need salt but I stirred in a few grinding of pepper.

To eat the salad was put on a plate, followed by the the potatoes and chicken. The sauce was slathered on top.

It was pungent enough to cheer up a grey and wet evening.