Christmas 2009

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.