20 February,
I lived at Stourhead 1985-2000 and occasionally do a piece on pubs under the pen name Egon Toast for the parish magazine.  Today I submitted the following.:

The Three Horseshoes, Batcombe

There is a decent bar scene but not really to Red Lion people.  The food is good (not posh) and well priced – and the pub is open seven days a week and all day.  At weekends there is a London contingent – unusual in Somerset but ‘media types’ not uncommon.  The pub has the sort of buzz that reflects a good looking experienced young owner with two kids.  He is ex of the Stapleton Arms, Buckhorn Weston & Queens Arms, Corton Denham and tough London postings.

The Beckford Arms, Fonthill Gifford

Charlie Luxton & Dan Brod are business partners who own and run this excellent pub that was burnt down in July 2010 but rose again from the ashes and re-opened exactly one year later.  They are both ex of Babington House, the product of England’s most successful hotelier/restaurateur Nick Jones, who is also an investor, as well as founder of the Soho House chain in London, New York & L.A. and other highly rated hotels and restaurants in London.  The trade keep their eye on him because he never seems to put a foot wrong and is ever the pioneer.  Kirsty Young, ex of the BBC News, now Desert Island Discs is his wife.  It’s life in the fast lane.

Top class everything allied to a youthful, stylish informality going on ‘grunge’ is the hallmark of this school of public service.  Often it can seem like the ‘Sloany Pony’ but without the inconvenience and expense of going to the Metrop – in lovely country in fact.  It also has a good choice of well-kept ales and a cheerful bar scene in a nice space and overall, the best food.

In short, I rate it the one to beat for many miles around.  If you are too blotto to drive home, the bedrooms are tops and more of them since the re-build.

Compasses, Chicksgrove

For years this has been ‘Wiltshire Pub of the Year’ in ‘Wiltshire Life’.  The location is well off the beaten track which makes it nice to sit out in good weather.  Inside it is a long windowless space with only two tables near daylight but the staff are young, attractive, friendly and competent with food and drink to match.  I like ‘Plain Ales’ and they usually have one.  It is hard to beat when you dismount from your bike and sit outside with very good food and beer, knowing you can just sit there and let it all happen.

Tuesday 7 February,
2 February. Drove to the Octagon Theatre in Yeovil to Pride & Prejudice.  My host is unusually generous and books up to ten seats and takes a party, one of which provides dinner afterwards.  The play compared poorly with the last TV production I saw and it was hard to hear.  At half time in the bar I was pleased when our host led a consensus that dinner would be the next act.
Last autumn he booked three plays at the Ustinov in Bath and in each case they were excellent.  They all had the same players, one was classical, a modern translation of Eurydice, the next was a new translation of 'The Phoenix of Madrid' by Calderon da la Barca C17. That was my favourite - stylish and amusing.  Finally was another C17  by the Frenchman Marizot - also good.  The differences between Spanish and French cultures were as clear in the 1600's as they are today.  The big countries of Europe are much more than different geographies, they are different cultures with languages defining different ways of looking at things. It was clear 350 years ago and it still is.
By now I felt I knew the players and they were always very well cast.  Bath itself is a treat because if you are early there are several places to enjoy a pint and afterwards you are spoilt for choice of places to eat.

Saturday 4 February,,
A bit snow in the afternoon - that made it easy to spend a few hours cooking with a view to making something that would do for next week.  Being the end of the pheasant season I bought a brace for £5 and did a soupy stew Gordon Ramsay recipe, five root veg, mushrooms and chestnuts - very good indeed.   If a meal is good enough to look forward to at the end of the day, I don't mind if it is the same one for a few days in row.

That evening I set out to dine with good friends about ten miles away.  Getting down my track was more testing than I anticipated and after thoroughly good company, comestibles and potables I was pleased to be offered a bed for the night.  Sunday, one might have been in another country judging by the weather - all snow and ice gone but on leaving the first vehicle I saw was a new car upside-down in the road.  Glad I slept over.  My hosts, much more than is usual, can be relied upon to have a mix of interesting people and the next morning we took up on my plan to start 'literatours' - with enough ideas for me to make notes on getting home.
Sunday lunch with a good lady friend only few miles from the previous night's dinner.  If you're a singleton a family Sunday lunch is a bit of treat,especially when its done as well as this.
Monday, I was at the office all day and was asked out to dinner with my favourite wine merchant - old friends from my married days in Wiltshire.  I ate very well and drank even better.  It is time I started my spiffing stew -that will be on Tuesday.

Saturday 28 January,

Another Burns Night party - but this time three days late and in the village hall in Wanstrow with over 120 people.  It was my first time in this newish hall, built with a bit of lottery money and good enough to be proud of.  It was a fund raiser for a parish of five churches in which my hosts play a leading role.
The arrangements were tops for quality and the ten people at my table were too - all good fun.  The caterers bottled out by supplying what was basically Christmas dinner+haggis.  They shied away from the full Scotch obviously supposing that Sassenachs would recoil in horror (perhaps rightly) as the 'great chieftain o' the puddin' race was not up to the standard of the last one I described form Dingwall.

Then came the ceremony with some good lines on the violin followed by a catch of Celtic song.  Between these good bits was boring recitation not helped by the sound system.  When there was a pause for regrouping, I took flight.  Next day I was told I left two hours before the end and they  wished they had done likewise but their cars were blocked by intensive parking.  I don't often do the savvy thing but on this occasion I had parked at the pub across the road so was well placed for the road home.

Sunday 29 January,

I walked to the Three Horseshoes in Batcombe which is less than 2 miles from home - steep up and  steeper down but with a stretch on top when you can see from Alfred's Tower to Glastonbury Tor -say 15 miles as the crow flies but more by road. The first is a folly 1772 by Henry Hoare of Stourhead on which estate it stands. It is of brick and 160 feet high on a land about 700 feet above sea level so is visible for miles around. Some think it was a vanity project looking for an excuse but others say it marks the site where King Arthur gathered contingents from the West, his stronghold, and the South before going on to Eddington, just north of Westbury where in 878 he fought and defeated Guthrun, the King of the Danes and converted him to Christianity.  The following treaty of Wedmore established the line, roughly from London to Manchester dividing the Saxons, south and west of it from the Danelaw, north and east of it.  It was along either side of this border that Anglo-Saxon lost its three genders and six case endings thus paving the way for what is  still Europe's only language without genders - English.  Though the languages either side of the line had distant common origins they had  grown too far apart for mutual understanding.  It seems they found it more natural to extend their vocabulary than to learn the grammar of Beowulf.  Our Norman conquerors officially outlawed the native speech for 300 years while still returning to France to find brides.  After Joan of Arc they were no longer able to do so and therefore started to marry the Saxon nobility and a new language was born in the bedroom. 

The Tor is early 1300's, on a prominence of 417 ft and height of about 50 ft.  Though smaller than the Tower, its visual impact is greater because of the almost sea level base of the unnaturally conical hill which it crowns.  In 1539 the last Abbot, Richard Whiting was dragged to the top and with two of his monks, hung, drawn and quartered, their  heads put on spikes to be publicly reviled.  He was a good man but the wealth and power  of Glastonbury, second only to Westminster in Britain, aroused even stronger feelings than bankers do now.

  It is a good example of the pleasures of being on foot because I can't think of a spot on the road where this splendid sight can be seen.  I have found that it reliably wow's visitors and a few natives who have not previously bothered to get out of their cars.

I hardly went to this pub under the previous owners and on my first visit to the present owner I introduced myself.  He politely replied my name is Kav.' Odd name, I said, what is your surname? Javvi - just as odd I replied. 'My dad is Persian and my mother  is Scouse and half Chinese'.  Then he looked at me intently and said 'so no chance that I will be the village idiot', clearly implying that my narrower gene pool and advancing years exposed me to this possibility.  Repartee with well mannered bright people is fun.

I was warming to him so continued to ask questions.  He comes from Chiswick, went to Hill House prep school and Malvern.  'Posh stuff' and then straight into the trade? I asked.  Reply: just because you see a chap behind a bar you assume he is uneducated!  Well, did you go to university?  Yes.  Nottingham, media studies 2:2, I taunted. 'Leeds, civil engineering, 2:1' he  retorted - plainly pleased to have won that round.

Monday/Tuesday30/31 January,

Gillingham Dorset to Norbiton (not heard of it) nr Kingston-upon-Thames - with three closely timed changes in two hours.  The longest wait was at Surbiton and I was surprised to see fast trains following with about a minute between them.  I knew this happens in Japan, I didn't  know it did on South  West Trains - new  respect.  Without 'thetrainline.com' I would not have known this permutation of  trains was possible.
I was a guest, dinner B&B, of friends I knew in my days as the founder/publisher of Admap - a semi technical monthly mag for market research and media people. He was a top ad agency guy. Next morning was the funeral of the wife of a mutual friend of long standing, in the parish church at Weybridge.  He was a MD of one of the independent commercial TV companies before they became ITV.

Funerals, I think, are  more fun than weddings where you often know less than half those present but you know many more at a friend's funeral and after the proper bit a good party can develop, and it did.  It also brought to mind the distance between my circumstances and the life I lead with theirs - 1930's homes in the leafier 'burbs' rather than 'dinky, dingley dell' 1660's in remote Somerset, over a mile from my nearest neighbours - landlord apart.  They have superior comfort and amenities but I have become used to my relative poverty combined with superior beauty and quiet.  We are an adaptable species and we get to like what we've got.

Wednesday  1 February,
The most eccentric pub I know is called Tucker's Grave at Faulkland between Frome and Radstock.  Legend has  it that 'Tucker' is buried beneath a flagstone at the entrance and another man was killed in the outdoor loo which was too near the road and was hit by a car.  They moved it (the loo).
There is one room where everybody sits and talks as if invited to a party.  Very old-fashioned - no food except crisps and pork scratchings and drinks are draught ale or two draught ciders. On arrival you feel as if you are breaking into a private party.  On this occasion one man was very drunk but not noisy and a young black man was with him and another guy who was small, dark, noisy and a singer of some sort.  The drunk man was the head chef at the highly rated Babington House -apparently not on duty that night.  A local farmer was teasing him beautifully - quite an entertainment.

Among a certain set there had been sorrow because the place shut for 12 weeks, after which the long time owners couldn't sell it and missed their wonderfully odd life, so re-opened it to the relief of many good people.  The elderly owners, man and wife, both sit in the room with you and rise to fetch drinks when they spot an empty glass.  I was there to meet a man I had only once met before, about eight years ago with an eye to discussing business.  When he discovered I was once Admap (magazine) over 20 years ago, his story began where mine left off.  He is only 40 years old and made his way in the areas Admap was revealing to a wider public as I  sold it.  We still knew many of the same people but apart from reminiscing I am not sure it will lead anywhere but we plan to meet again next month.  Its odd how paths can cross, long ways from home and he is plainly a good guy.

It was Burns night last night and this morning is a hard landing.  A lady I know had a damn good party for 21 people. She is fortunate in having a house with rooms big enough for the job but recently widowed she be might be over-housed, when she's not having parties.  I was neep and tattie basher chief and the haggis was the 'business' from Dingwall.  Refreshment supplies were well primed by the hostess and with a byo policy there was more than enough to fortify the company for Scotch dancing.  But before that a handsome 30 year old in sharp Scotch rig did an impressively fluent and animated rendition of "Great Chieftain o' the Puddin' Race and we all followed with the full Caledonian indulgence plus a whole Stilton cheese - a delicious English corrective.

The 'eightsome' I classify as honorary English because I have long been able to do it but all other Scotch dances I consider a spectator sport.  Being once married to a Scot for thirty years I know of what I speak. The women look sexy with their breasts standing out when twirling about while some younger men in full Scotch kit look attractively warlike. Being no longer in my leaping prime (b 1937) I sloped off soon after midnight.

It was my first day home back in Somerset after four days in Paris as the guest of my super generous godson (godsend) and three in London.  In Paris I ate in five restaurants, always with four or five others.  Only in one of these did the meal seem to me to be better than in London.  That was in Bofinger, near the Bastille - I think it is the oldest Brasserie, something that came to Paris after the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-1 when many Alsations who did not want to be Germans fled west, many settling in Paris bringing brewing with them (Brasserie = Brewery). It is large, with delightful 1873 features like a stained glass dome.  The menu is long but the dishes simple.  The first oysters in ages that tasted sweet and delicious rather than like lead and sea-water.  A seafood sauerkraut (choucroute) with a whole lobster & a hollandaise sauce with horseradish - delicious.

You may be tired of this, so I am off to the pub on my way home to dinner.