Splashing out on a midsummer's night, er, feast

Today offered the hottest day of summer. The heat stirred the government into standing on many toes – over Brexit (as ever), over capital punishment, very surprisingly – and me into splashing out with a home grown evening meal. Perhaps I almost mean home groan.

Gross injustice is what causes me to eat rather differently from most, but I try not to let it get the better of my humour.

And I can resort to Nature for help. Tonight's food from the builders' rubble tip I’ve converted into a vegetable garden was a real help, and continues to be.

Fish provided the protein, but happily not from the pools I've dug to help amphibians tour about the neighbourhood.

Frog is not on the menu

Frog is not for me. Anyway, the present resident croaker is the sweetest addition to the once rubble mountain, where he and a growing family seem happy.

The converted garden provided potatoes for the main course, mint for the salad, and rhubarb for the pudding, swimming in some pleasant Lidl yogurt.

The potatoes are no ordinary potatoes. They come from quite an unusual breed. Their grandpa, donated by gardener-poet friend, Robert Graham, are a strange colour of dark red. Unlike King Edwards, they are not just red skinned but deep red all the way through.

An odd boil-in-the bag sea critter

Even the juice is not dissimilar to the colour of blood.

The protein to celebrate the scorcher of a day was part of a rather strange boil-in-the bag sea critter from Sainsbury’s. Its economy made up for a lack of taste. The salad was half of yesterday’s bag from Aldi.

In this part of London, the evening within the abode sweltered at just over 30 degrees, quite intoxicating enough to make Lidl’s spring water, at 17p for two litres, as in demand as wine was once at my table, rather a long time ago.

Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com