We decided to escape Christmas this year. That means not cooking Christmas dinner and not feeding family and friends. We have done that for several years. However, I do admit that other family members and friends have occasionally laid it on for us as well. Last year my Son bought an enormous and exorbitantly expensive lump of beef, which I enjoyed much more than turkey. But we have done lots of Christmases at home. We are on the last lap of our lives and sometimes hanker to be together, just the two of us, cosy, friendly, cuddly and alone. Younger readers, you probably don't realise quite how touchy feely we wrinklies can be, right up to the last gasping breath. If you are ever old and still part of a couple, grab hold and keep cuddling. It will extend your life.
This year we rented a tiny cottage in South Somerset. We took food for breakfasts and snacks and two pieces of fillet steak for Christmas Day. We couldn't be bothered with turkey and all the trimmings, and we expected the village pub would feed us all the other days. This turned out to be a miscalculation. The pub did not do food on Boxing Day either, nor did the pub in the next village, and we had no car to go further afield. So on Boxing Day we had a boiled egg each with baked potato and grated cheese and tomato, followed by an orange. I think I lost some weight, not a bad result.
Our local pub the Bell Inn at Broadway was straight out of Thomas Hardy, wonderful to me, stone flagged floor, blazing log fire, traditional Taunton cider on draught, £2.10p a pint, how strong I did not enquire, but delicious and yes, probably strong. Two gamekeepers talked to us, offered us pheasants for Christmas Day. In retrospect if only we had said yes please! Food at the pub was ordinary, OK, satisfactory. Friends from nearby came over and we all had a jolly meal. Probably microwaved or boil in bag, but tasty nevertheless. Our friends were staying B & B at the pub and went to bed early. We went home. Wife straight to telly, so me back to pub. Landlord now in armchair watching Terminator Two. Barman also watching Treminator Two. Nobody else in pub. I had come out to escape telly, especially reminiscing type telly, best romantic moments, or best standup comics of 2009 etc. Pint of traditional cider. Drank it on my own. Then had to go back home to escape Terminator 2.
Next day, Christmas Eve, walking in crisp sunshine, no snow in Somerset at this time, we discovered the Five Dials at Horton, next village. Lovely clean refurbished country pub, interesting menu. Wheehe! Home cooked real food! Guess what? All tables 100% booked this evening, so no chance of a meal. Excellent local farmhouse Vintage Cider, better than at the Bell and only £2 per pint. Vintage in cider terms usually means two years old, but that's good enough for me. But there would be no food that evening, and they were not doing food Christmas day, nor Boxing Day. Our two friends went home that afternoon.
But it was Christmas Eve, and being in the mood, me anyway, we decided to walk back to the Five Dials early afternoon. On the way we passed the Horton village Post Office where my wife decided to buy a newspaper to read in the pub while I was drinking the cider. Please note it was I who persuaded her to go back to the pub, but it was she who lured me into the Post Office. All would have been well if we had stuck to the pub.
Horton Post Office was the most delightful den of iniquity I have entered in many a long year. I quickly passed by the table full of mince pies labelled "Please help yourself." How could we, we were strangers? But I had read the small print which said "and then have a Christmas drink with us at the counter." Some blind instinct led me straight to the main counter while my wife searched for a copy of The Times or The Guardian. Anything else she does not consider to be a proper newspaper.
It was two o'clock in the afternoon and the staff were affectionately pissed. "Would you like sherry, or white wine?" asked a lady with one eye slightly closed. I wondered whether she had some sort of visual disability then realised that like everybody else, she was mellowly inebriated. I learned years ago as a publican to stop serving anyone who had earlier had two eyes wide open, then came up to the bar with one eye partly or wholly closed. It meant they had become pissed. Anyway, be that as it may, not being in any way responsible for Horton Post Office, "Have you got any red wine?" I asked, with both my eyes open. "Yes Darling, we have 3 litres of red, which we have not yet opened because so far no-one has asked for red, but now you have arrived at last, we will open it for you. In fact I may possibly join you in a glass, or rather a plastic tumbler." With amazing dexterity, since she was so clearly inebriated, she opened a wine box of South African Shiraz, half filled a plastic tumbler which I thought was for me, but she put it on the counter at her side, and before I could protest and say something like, "a little less than that for me please," I found myself in possession of a full half a pint of South African shiraz. And lovely it was and while I was drinking it and my wife was reading The Times and looking at me indulgently (as wives do) I learned the history of the villages of Horton and Broadway, and the family history of the postmistress, which was a bit sad, and also the histories of several other local people. I may possibly have told the lovely lady a few indiscrete anecdotes about my own past, as you do when nearing the bottom of a half pint tumbler of shiraz. Did I have a little top up? I may have. I shall definitely now petition the Government to STOP the closure of rural Post Offices. They are VITAL for the survival of the rural population. Talk about pubs taking over Post Offices. No need for that in Horton, Somerset. The Post Office could take over the pub! Or they might have done before the rebirth of the Five Dials.
As originally intended, we walked to the pub, the Five Dials at Horton, where I had more of the lovely Somerset farmhouse cider, and we were offered plates of four assorted cheeses and biscuits, or if you preferred, garlic bread. And these were not little bits of cheese with sticks, but a proper plateful, with plenty of proper bread. South Somerset seemed very OK to me.
On the way home, we walked past a house with a notice at the gate. "Simon Towler, Master Thatcher - member of the Somerset Master Thatchers Association." I looked at his house, a master thatcher's work of art. "His house must be worth a million pounds," I said to my wise wife. "That is his advertising board," she said. "It's outside the house because he's just renewed the thatch. They let him leave it by the gate. That doesn't mean the house is his." She was right of course, Master Thatcher's name was on a board leaning against the bank by the front gate. Apparently Mrs Thatcher's son was not as wealthy as I thought.
So, no food at Horton on Christmas Eve, left us no alternative but down to the Bell at Broadway. We had a meal, just the two of us, in front or a wonderful roaring log fire. We were the only two customers in the pub, apart from the landlord who produced our meals, and the barman. When we had finished eating, the two of them were glued to the television; so guess what, we walked to the Five Dials at Horton. It had about a hundred customers. All the tables in the dining area were occupied as they had said they would be and all the other customers were still being offered cheese and garlic bread as they had at lunchtime, and there were several labrador dogs, some of which spoke to us. It was a very happy and friendly place. They had told us in the drinking Post Office that afternoon that the Five Dials had been closed for a year and a half, and then this young couple had bought it and refurbished it, and it had been open for six weeks. Paul and Sarah, who were making a success of it, had been redundant bankers. I wish them well. They decided not to stay on and wait for the extravagant bonuses the banks would pay this year after we had bailed them out. Perhaps they had no choice and were made redundant, as lots were. To be fair, I don't think they were from the upper echelons of banking. Most people who work in banks earn quite modest salaries. I suspect that Paul and Sarah escaped with moderate success, enough to refurbish the Five Dials. And now they were running it well. They deserve to succeed. I don't suppose they will ever read this though. But I might just go back to see them. I never did get to sample their cooked food, just the cheese and garic bread.
Friday 15 January 2010
Tuesday 5 January 2010
More about London pubs
One reason I am interested in pubs is because in the remote past I was a publican. Leaving aside the bit where I foolishly opted out of Oxford University and became a trainee hotel manager, and leaving out the period when I became Assistant Manager of the Sefton Hotel, Babbacombe, Devon (one of my 58 different jobs), in 1956 I was Bar Manager and cellarman at Shepherds Tavern, Shepherds Market. Mayfair, London W.1. It used to be a pub for the posh people who lived in the area, and the performers on Radio Luxembourg. If you are old enough to remember when pop music came from Radio Luxembourg, Your Station of the Stars, and Hilversum (Dames an Heeren, Jonges an Mechas, heer is Hilversum Ein), spelling probably wrong but that's how it sounded, Dutch, before pirate radio and long before Radio One, those Luxembourg broadcasts did not come from Luxembourg City, but were pre-recorded in studios at 38 Hertford Street, round the corner from Shepherds. Radio Luxembourg invented the Top Twenty in 1948. So regular customers in my bar were people like Alan Dell, Alan Freeman, Jimmy Young, Kenny Everett, Jimmy Savile, and sometimes Jimmy Edwards (handlebar moustache). I have no idea what he had to do with Radio Luxembourg, but perhaps he lived round the corner, as did Stirling Moss. Jimmy Edwards drank only halves, but lots of them.
In my time off, I used to do the odd shift behind the bar at the Grenadier, Old Barrack Yard, off Knightsbridge, helping out my mate Tom (forgotten his second name, but they still have a photo of him in the bar.) I think it was he who invented the particular version of the Bloody Mary for which the Grenadier is now famous. One Sunday afternoon after closing time (pubs used to close in the afternoon) we decided to find out what was buried under a mound in the cellar floor. The Grenadier was once the unofficial officers' mess for the Duke of Wellington's Regiment, and in 1957 the back end of the cellar had an earth floor. In a corner, the earth floor had a small but distinct mound. That Sunday afternoon Tom, me and Phil a barman from the Dorchester decided to excavate it.
About six inches down, we found an earthenware flagon, carefully corked, with the cork covered in oilcloth tied tight with string and sealed with wax. We chipped off the wax, removed the cloth, looked at the cork. Not a cork as in bottle, but about three and a half inches in diameter. We decided a corkscrew would break it up, so a very sharp knife was fetched from the kitchen and we eased it away from the neck of the jar and lifted it out in one piece. Unmistakably alcoholic fumes enveloped us. We all breathed deeply, amazed.
"Better get glasses," said Tom sensibly, and went off to get some. Came back with Paris Goblets - that's a small wineglass to the uninitiated. We poured an amber liquid from the stone jar into our three glasses. It was like thin golden syrup, but it smelled so divine we had to taste it. It was syrupy indeed, but nutty, alcoholic and delicious. We had a glass each and decanted the rest into bottles and corked them.
The stone jar was embossed with the name of a Chelsea wine merchant. We looked them up in the telephone directory and found they no longer existed. Tom took the empty jar to his friend who ran Gordons Wine Bar in Villiers Stree by Charing Cross. His friend was an expert on the history of booze and also London. He recognised the Chelsea merchant and told us they were importers and distributors of Madeira wine, who went bust in 1847. This suggested that our jar was at least 100 years old. Apparently it was not surprising that the contents were still alcoholic. At that time Madeira was fortified with large amounts of brandy and would last at least 100 years. Had it been in a bottle it would have been worth a fortune. But it was a bit viscous, so we added a bit of brandy to thin it down, and drank it gradually and with great joy over the following twelve months, or perhaps less.
The reason my thoughts strayed to pubs in Mayfair and Knightsbridge (not areas I visit much, now I live near the Lea Valley and Waltham and Epping Forests, far away from central London), was that I had to attend the Annual General Meeting of the London Branch of the Old Petriburgians Assocation at the Wilton Arms in Kinnerton Street. The only real purpose of the meeting was to decide where we were going to have our next dinner, usually same place as last year, and the year before. We try to make the AGM as short as possible, re-electing everybody nem con, so that we can concentrate on the lamb hotpot they always do at the Wilton Arms, and of course the wine. All very enjoyable, but the other members are city types and none of them lives in London, so they have to get home. So off they go and there I am on my own.
The Grenadier is just around the corner. I poke my head around the door. It is packed with loud Americans and there is no chance of getting to the bar without employing a fixed bayonet, so I decide to carry on to Hertford Street and Shepherds. It has gone down in the world. Gone is the notice which used to say "No dogs except Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, by order of His Majesty King Charles 11, 1671." I do not think the present building could have been there in that year, but in my day it did have a genuine sedan chair as a telephone booth. It also had a notice saying "Unaccompanied ladies will not be served." So the good ladies who stood guard in Hertford Street could not get a drink until they had solicited a gentleman who was not in too much of a hurry. But now Shepherds has two television screens and a wooden boarded floor. The floorboards are probably old, but do they not know that Shepherds was the first pub in London to have a fitted carpet, wall to wall?
Michael Aspel used to come in for half of Guinness. I bet he doesn't drink there now. Long before him I remember the Marquess of Milford Haven (Mrs Queen's cousin) coming in and asking for a box of matches. Of course we sold matches in those days, two pence a box. He handed over a five pound note. They were white in those days. Most people earned less than five pounds in a week. Brenda, our cockney barmaid of considerable but indeterminable age was not nonplussed. She had worked in Mayfair for thirty years, so she had seen a white fiver before, even if I had not. She held it up to the light, decided it was OK, put it in the till, leaving the till drawer open. She gave his Lordship the box of matches then took from the safe a five pound bag of copper coins, opened it, removed two pence from it which she put into the till. She handed the bag of coins to his Lordship and before he had time to protest, which he was about to do, Brenda said firmly, "Legal tender Milord." "Indeed it is," said the Marquess, "and thank you so much." As he went out of the door, several of the customers clapped their hands. Brenda did not acknowledge their applause.
I sat on a stool at the end of the bar looking dignified. Some young men came in and one of them came up to me and said, "Nice pub you have here sir."
"Its not actually my pub," I said, "but it was 52 years ago."
"Impossible," he said, "you don't look old enough." Well of course I don't and I don't feel that old, but I take no credit for that. It just happens to some people and not others.
So I sat on my stool in Shepherds and remembered. Moira Shearer used to come in with her husband Ludovik Kennedy. They sometimes had a drink in the bar, but more often went straight upstairs to the very discreet retaurant on the first floor. One of my regulars in the bar was Prince Hassan of Afghanistan, a sweet little man who invited me to a party in a flat in Bryanston Street, at the back of the Cumberland Hotel. That was an eye-opener. I had been there for at least an hour before I realised that everybody, even the ones in dresses and skirts, was male, and that everybody but me was gay, even the very senior Naval and Army officers, in uniform. Interestingly the RAF was not represented. It needed considerable diplomacy to exit past the very butch and muscular doormen, who I had assumed were there to keep undesirables out, though they seemed to want to keep me in. The Prince came into Shepherds the following evening and apologised. "I'd never seen you with a girl," he said, "so I assumed you were one of us." Well he'd only ever seen me when I was working. I wonder if he's still alive. He'd be in his seventies now, probably the King.
You can get a 38 bus in Piccadilly to Clapton Pond, where you change to a 48 to Walthamstow Central. I prefer buses to tubes when I have time to spare. You see more. Of course Victoria Line from Green Park would have halved the journey time. Either way for us OAP's it's free with a Freedom Pass. Wonderful!
In my time off, I used to do the odd shift behind the bar at the Grenadier, Old Barrack Yard, off Knightsbridge, helping out my mate Tom (forgotten his second name, but they still have a photo of him in the bar.) I think it was he who invented the particular version of the Bloody Mary for which the Grenadier is now famous. One Sunday afternoon after closing time (pubs used to close in the afternoon) we decided to find out what was buried under a mound in the cellar floor. The Grenadier was once the unofficial officers' mess for the Duke of Wellington's Regiment, and in 1957 the back end of the cellar had an earth floor. In a corner, the earth floor had a small but distinct mound. That Sunday afternoon Tom, me and Phil a barman from the Dorchester decided to excavate it.
About six inches down, we found an earthenware flagon, carefully corked, with the cork covered in oilcloth tied tight with string and sealed with wax. We chipped off the wax, removed the cloth, looked at the cork. Not a cork as in bottle, but about three and a half inches in diameter. We decided a corkscrew would break it up, so a very sharp knife was fetched from the kitchen and we eased it away from the neck of the jar and lifted it out in one piece. Unmistakably alcoholic fumes enveloped us. We all breathed deeply, amazed.
"Better get glasses," said Tom sensibly, and went off to get some. Came back with Paris Goblets - that's a small wineglass to the uninitiated. We poured an amber liquid from the stone jar into our three glasses. It was like thin golden syrup, but it smelled so divine we had to taste it. It was syrupy indeed, but nutty, alcoholic and delicious. We had a glass each and decanted the rest into bottles and corked them.
The stone jar was embossed with the name of a Chelsea wine merchant. We looked them up in the telephone directory and found they no longer existed. Tom took the empty jar to his friend who ran Gordons Wine Bar in Villiers Stree by Charing Cross. His friend was an expert on the history of booze and also London. He recognised the Chelsea merchant and told us they were importers and distributors of Madeira wine, who went bust in 1847. This suggested that our jar was at least 100 years old. Apparently it was not surprising that the contents were still alcoholic. At that time Madeira was fortified with large amounts of brandy and would last at least 100 years. Had it been in a bottle it would have been worth a fortune. But it was a bit viscous, so we added a bit of brandy to thin it down, and drank it gradually and with great joy over the following twelve months, or perhaps less.
The reason my thoughts strayed to pubs in Mayfair and Knightsbridge (not areas I visit much, now I live near the Lea Valley and Waltham and Epping Forests, far away from central London), was that I had to attend the Annual General Meeting of the London Branch of the Old Petriburgians Assocation at the Wilton Arms in Kinnerton Street. The only real purpose of the meeting was to decide where we were going to have our next dinner, usually same place as last year, and the year before. We try to make the AGM as short as possible, re-electing everybody nem con, so that we can concentrate on the lamb hotpot they always do at the Wilton Arms, and of course the wine. All very enjoyable, but the other members are city types and none of them lives in London, so they have to get home. So off they go and there I am on my own.
The Grenadier is just around the corner. I poke my head around the door. It is packed with loud Americans and there is no chance of getting to the bar without employing a fixed bayonet, so I decide to carry on to Hertford Street and Shepherds. It has gone down in the world. Gone is the notice which used to say "No dogs except Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, by order of His Majesty King Charles 11, 1671." I do not think the present building could have been there in that year, but in my day it did have a genuine sedan chair as a telephone booth. It also had a notice saying "Unaccompanied ladies will not be served." So the good ladies who stood guard in Hertford Street could not get a drink until they had solicited a gentleman who was not in too much of a hurry. But now Shepherds has two television screens and a wooden boarded floor. The floorboards are probably old, but do they not know that Shepherds was the first pub in London to have a fitted carpet, wall to wall?
Michael Aspel used to come in for half of Guinness. I bet he doesn't drink there now. Long before him I remember the Marquess of Milford Haven (Mrs Queen's cousin) coming in and asking for a box of matches. Of course we sold matches in those days, two pence a box. He handed over a five pound note. They were white in those days. Most people earned less than five pounds in a week. Brenda, our cockney barmaid of considerable but indeterminable age was not nonplussed. She had worked in Mayfair for thirty years, so she had seen a white fiver before, even if I had not. She held it up to the light, decided it was OK, put it in the till, leaving the till drawer open. She gave his Lordship the box of matches then took from the safe a five pound bag of copper coins, opened it, removed two pence from it which she put into the till. She handed the bag of coins to his Lordship and before he had time to protest, which he was about to do, Brenda said firmly, "Legal tender Milord." "Indeed it is," said the Marquess, "and thank you so much." As he went out of the door, several of the customers clapped their hands. Brenda did not acknowledge their applause.
I sat on a stool at the end of the bar looking dignified. Some young men came in and one of them came up to me and said, "Nice pub you have here sir."
"Its not actually my pub," I said, "but it was 52 years ago."
"Impossible," he said, "you don't look old enough." Well of course I don't and I don't feel that old, but I take no credit for that. It just happens to some people and not others.
So I sat on my stool in Shepherds and remembered. Moira Shearer used to come in with her husband Ludovik Kennedy. They sometimes had a drink in the bar, but more often went straight upstairs to the very discreet retaurant on the first floor. One of my regulars in the bar was Prince Hassan of Afghanistan, a sweet little man who invited me to a party in a flat in Bryanston Street, at the back of the Cumberland Hotel. That was an eye-opener. I had been there for at least an hour before I realised that everybody, even the ones in dresses and skirts, was male, and that everybody but me was gay, even the very senior Naval and Army officers, in uniform. Interestingly the RAF was not represented. It needed considerable diplomacy to exit past the very butch and muscular doormen, who I had assumed were there to keep undesirables out, though they seemed to want to keep me in. The Prince came into Shepherds the following evening and apologised. "I'd never seen you with a girl," he said, "so I assumed you were one of us." Well he'd only ever seen me when I was working. I wonder if he's still alive. He'd be in his seventies now, probably the King.
You can get a 38 bus in Piccadilly to Clapton Pond, where you change to a 48 to Walthamstow Central. I prefer buses to tubes when I have time to spare. You see more. Of course Victoria Line from Green Park would have halved the journey time. Either way for us OAP's it's free with a Freedom Pass. Wonderful!
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