We went to our local pub yesterday evening. When I say 'local' I mean one of the closest pubs to our house, about two miles away. I'd heard that the bar was decorated with an amazing quantity of lights and decorations, so we thought we'd go up there in the early evening and have a drink, just the one round before supper, and admire the glitz. We checked the opening times on their website and got in the car and drove over (a round trip of four miles is a long way to walk in the dark to see some Christmas lights), and it was dark and shut. Whatever the website said about opening at 6.00pm on Tuesdays turned out not to apply to Christmas bank holiday Tuesday. We drove home again.
Pubs have a lot to contend with, quite apart from the issue of drink-driving. If the Systems Administrator and I want to have a quiet drink we know a splendid venue. There is a log fire for winter evenings, and a secluded garden for summer. We always get seats, and the chairs are comfortable. There is free wi-fi, the music, if any, is to our taste, and there is no giant television screen on the wall showing football. A friendly cat is likely to come and see us. The drinks are relatively cheap, the food is genuinely home cooked, not out of a food service company van, and nobody will try and charge us £7.95 for sausage and mash. You can see the punchline coming. It's our house. Our friends have equally pleasant and congenial houses, so when we meet up it's generally for a meal in somebody's home.
I do actually like pubs, or at least I like pubs in attractive buildings with quirky characterful decor that doesn't smack of the pub designer's formula, that keep their beer well, don't play loud music, and don't make me feel as though I'm intruding into somebody else's boozer. That rules out a lot of pubs, but still leaves quite a few. When the SA and I are on holiday we go to pubs for lunch or for a pre-supper outing to see some fresh faces before retreating to the self-catering cottage. A not too long country walk with relatives or friends ending at a pub can be very nice as part of a weekend visit. The rest of the time I rarely go to a pub at all. Several of my friends don't like beer, and by extension don't like pubs. When we meet we are more likely to go to an art gallery or garden and a cafe than a pub.
Pubs are supposed to be at the heart of the community, bringing people together. The trouble is, when I consider the people I know and would like to share my spare time with, they are scattered in an arc across Essex and London, and dotted across the rest of the UK. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, compared to the golden days of pubs when everybody lived two streets from where they were born, we can keep in touch by phone and e-mail and text. If we want to see each other it's easy to arrange. We don't have to go and hang about the local pub in the hope of bumping into each other. I'm actually quite keen on community. I take part in beekeepers' events, and the music society, and do talks for the woodland charity and sometimes about gardening or beekeeping, and so meet people living in my area, if not my village. Some are good friends, some people I don't know well but see on a regular basis, others I probably won't see again. Just the same social impulse that would have been filled in the past by going to the pub.
So I fear there are more pub closures to come. I hope the industry will eventually reach an equilibrium, whereby those that are left are the best ones, with good beer and proper food and a nice ambience, which will be able to survive on the trade generated by people celebrating high days and holidays, boosted by extra events like live music and quizzes. If, when the SA and I go out for the day, we can no longer find a pleasant pub to have lunch in, then my life will be diminished and it will serve me right for not having supported my local one, since every pub is somebody's local. But it might make it easier for me by at least posting when it is closed on its website.
Showing posts with label pubs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pubs. Show all posts
Wednesday, 28 December 2011
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
non-stop culture
Well, that was a cultured 24 hours. I took my dad last night to hear a folk-jazz guitarist and an Irish harper at the Colchester Arts Centre. They are called Chris Newman and Maire ni Chathasaigh, except that there ought to be some accents over the Irish gaelic name that Blogspot's compose a post page won't do. They are very good, and my dad likes them. He had them as visitors to the folk club he used to run in Wales for his seventieth birthday celebration, in lieu of a party. Chris Newman is a great fan of 1930s swing jazz, and Maire is a traditional musician from West Cork, and they play some pure Irish folk, some jazz, and a lot that is somewhere in between. To get the accidentals on the Irish harp you have to flick a lever at the top, and whereas in a traditional folk piece the same settings would probably last you all the way through, to play jazz you have to flick the levers in mid flow. Frequently. As Chris Newman says, it's fun to watch. The harp seems to take a lot of tuning mid-concert, a process that involves various giant allen keys, and leaves Chris with some time to fill in, but he is a genial chap. He comes from Watford, he told us, one of the best towns in England to come from.
Today the Systems Administrator and I went to Cambridge to visit the exhibition Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence at the Fitzwilliam Museum. This brings together four pictures by Vermeer of women in a domestic setting with pictures by other Netherlands artists of the same era, and has reviewed very well (Telegraph, Observer, Independent). As I looked at one of the pictures in the first section I heard a woman standing next to me say to her companion 'Oh, I see, they're not all Vermeers'. Well, no, they wouldn't be. Four is pretty good going, and includes one loaned from the Louvre and on display in the UK for the first time ever. They are wonderful paintings. Go and see them. You have until Sunday 15th January. Entrance is free, though you are invited to make a donation, and if only I lived nearer to Cambridge I'd drop in often.
We had lunch first in an excellent side street pub which I'd heard get a plug recently on, of all places, The Today Programme. It is called The Cambridge Blue, and it says something about the organisation of human memory that when I was trying to remember the name of the road I couldn't recall Gwydir Street, but knew that it was something Welsh sounding. It is CAMRA's Cambridgeshire pub of the year for 2011, and why it came to be featured on the Today programme I really can't remember, but the beer was excellent and the food was nice. My carrot and coriander soup had a generous amount of coriander in it, and the SA says the sausage was good. There was no music, and the staff were cheerful. There were two partly used sacks of coal just inside the door, and packs of tonic all over one of the tables in the other front bar, behind which a little old boy was sitting impeturbably reading, but I don't mind an amount of clutter myself (the coal and the mixers. I don't mean the old boy was clutter).
A group of men of mature years were waiting for the last of their party to arrive, then all piled into a large taxi. They were happy and excited, and you could tell they were going somewhere special because they'd put on their tidy trousers (mustard coloured cords etc). The landlord told us they were going to a Michelin two starred restaurant for the £100 a head taster menu. 'They'll be drunk as lords by the time they get back' he proclaimed joyfully. 'A hundred quid a head. They might have put ties on'.
I had made a pencil sketch from Google maps of where the pub was, not having a working printer at the time. It had enough information on it that we would have found it (left hand turning off Mill Road). The SA has a pocket sized Garmin electronic navigator, which I find impossible to use, since by the time you are zoomed in close enough to see the street names, you can't see more than one stretch of about one road at a time, but the SA likes it and seems to understand it. Each to their own.
Today the Systems Administrator and I went to Cambridge to visit the exhibition Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence at the Fitzwilliam Museum. This brings together four pictures by Vermeer of women in a domestic setting with pictures by other Netherlands artists of the same era, and has reviewed very well (Telegraph, Observer, Independent). As I looked at one of the pictures in the first section I heard a woman standing next to me say to her companion 'Oh, I see, they're not all Vermeers'. Well, no, they wouldn't be. Four is pretty good going, and includes one loaned from the Louvre and on display in the UK for the first time ever. They are wonderful paintings. Go and see them. You have until Sunday 15th January. Entrance is free, though you are invited to make a donation, and if only I lived nearer to Cambridge I'd drop in often.
We had lunch first in an excellent side street pub which I'd heard get a plug recently on, of all places, The Today Programme. It is called The Cambridge Blue, and it says something about the organisation of human memory that when I was trying to remember the name of the road I couldn't recall Gwydir Street, but knew that it was something Welsh sounding. It is CAMRA's Cambridgeshire pub of the year for 2011, and why it came to be featured on the Today programme I really can't remember, but the beer was excellent and the food was nice. My carrot and coriander soup had a generous amount of coriander in it, and the SA says the sausage was good. There was no music, and the staff were cheerful. There were two partly used sacks of coal just inside the door, and packs of tonic all over one of the tables in the other front bar, behind which a little old boy was sitting impeturbably reading, but I don't mind an amount of clutter myself (the coal and the mixers. I don't mean the old boy was clutter).
A group of men of mature years were waiting for the last of their party to arrive, then all piled into a large taxi. They were happy and excited, and you could tell they were going somewhere special because they'd put on their tidy trousers (mustard coloured cords etc). The landlord told us they were going to a Michelin two starred restaurant for the £100 a head taster menu. 'They'll be drunk as lords by the time they get back' he proclaimed joyfully. 'A hundred quid a head. They might have put ties on'.
I had made a pencil sketch from Google maps of where the pub was, not having a working printer at the time. It had enough information on it that we would have found it (left hand turning off Mill Road). The SA has a pocket sized Garmin electronic navigator, which I find impossible to use, since by the time you are zoomed in close enough to see the street names, you can't see more than one stretch of about one road at a time, but the SA likes it and seems to understand it. Each to their own.
Friday, 12 August 2011
a trip to the other side of Essex
I went to Clavering for lunch today. This came about as I was meeting an old university friend who lives in north London, and suggested we could have a break from what had become our normal routine of meeting in the west end during her lunch hour. It turned out that, despite being an entrenched townie, what she would like to do would be to have lunch in an English country pub.
The Systems Administrator and I don't do pub lunches very often. In fact, we only do them when we are on holiday. The rest of the time we are too busy to interupt the flow of the day going out to lunch. Plus, an awful lot of pubs offer food nowadays, and a lot of the time it is considerably less good than we could make at home, for an amount of money that would keep us in ingredients for lunch for the best part of the whole week. We try to avoid pubs that look as though they are doing bad food cheaply, though we have made some wrong calls, or found ourselves in places where that seemed to be the only option. There are also pubs that do bad food for moderate amounts of money, OK food for middling prices, lunches that are OK but frankly expensive, and occasionally good food for quite a lot of money. Rarely is food excellent and moderately priced, and as for good and cheap, it don't exist.
Today's pub was chosen in rather a rush, since my friend had recently returned from holiday visiting family in the States to a mountain of work, and I had staggered home from Day Three in the Plant Centre to find my laptop was doing a monster update and had a Hal-like attitude to my using the internet that evening (I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that). The Cricketers at Clavering featured in my (2006) pub food guide and my friend's more up to date (2010) one, and it looked easy to find starting from either Colchester or London N1. It is also famous for being run by Jamie Oliver's parents, and is where young Jamie started his career. The name above the door is still Trevor Oliver, and the pub merits brown tourist signs from the point where you leave (or in my case cross) the M11. On that basis, although we hadn't booked a table in advance, I took the precaution of booking one in person as soon as I arrived. This turned out to be the correct call, as by the time my friend arrived they were fully booked. That's good going for a Friday in August. The S.A. and I went to a Suffolk pub with a foodie reputation last August (it was our wedding anniversary) and there were only two or three other tables occupied.
The Cricketers at Clavering has a lot of beams, most of which I think are structural, and a cheerful attitude, with large wine glasses set on the tables and purple cushions, that's more posh Essex than rural Herefordshire. The staff were jolly and kindly, if quite keen to rush us through ordering and then clearing the plates, and the food was pretty nice and quite expensive. I ate mackeral salad with beetroot and horseradish, since the S.A. detests mackeral so I might as well eat it when I'm out, and I'm a sucker for beetroot and horseradish (it's my Polish roots). My friend had a large piece of sea bass she said was good. Her daugher and daugher's friend had smoked salmon sandwiches which came with chips on the side, and I had some of those as well, as the girls said we could, and were loads of them. The grownups had cherry pie which was a bit too sweet, and the girls refused pudding (such self control). As half the party were driving and the other half were under-age we were on soft drinks. This is one of the reasons why the S.A. and I tend to only bother with pubs when we are on holiday and not about to get into a car, since one of the real pleasures of a pub visit is cask ale, well kept. Anyway, I hadn't seen my friend for a while, and it was a good lunch, and a perfectly nice pub, though I wouldn't drive fifty miles to get to it unless I were meeting somebody.
The rest of the party headed back to town after lunch. I think they had another visit to make on the way home, and were keen to return to the more respectable parts of London N1 before any Friday evening riots kicked off. I went to have a look at the church, on the basis that I don't visit that side of the county very often, and I wanted to make the most of it. Clavering church doesn't get a mention in Simon Jenkins' book of churches, but sounded worth a look from my preliminary web search, and merits a brief mention in my County Guide to English Churches (Jones and Tricker, 1992, Countryside Books).
The church is tucked down a small side road with absolutely no parking whatsoever. Goodness knows what they do for weddings. I backed up just in time, and parked in a residential street off the main road, but there didn't seem to be a car park anywhere near the church, or even a field you could use. The church backs on to farmland, and feels peaceful and secluded. In these times of theft and vandalism it is rather wonderful that it remains open, since there was nobody else there throughout my visit. There has been a church on the site since Saxon times, but the present structure was built in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Perpendicular style. I think the Victorians had a bit of a go at it, but it still has the original roof, and doesn't look obviously mucked about with. It is small but charming, the outside mostly flint, with a low tower. The interior is fine, plain, and somehow manages to look bigger than the outside. Having read up on it in advance, and armed with my book, I knew to note the thirteenth century Purbeck marble font (octagonal, very plainly decorated with arches), the Elizabethan pulpit (wooden, carved with flowers) and the fifteenth century screen (rather worm eaten).
Neither the book nor the websites I consulted made any mention of the carved figures along the roof. They have bare heads with shoulder length curly hair, wear tunics that are long at the back and short at the front and what look like leggings, textured to resemble either feathers or chain mail. The light wasn't very good by then and I couldn't honestly see. They seemed to have bare feet. Maybe they are angels. Perhaps they originally had wings, which have been lost or removed for safety purposes? There is some fifteenth century stained glass along the north aisle, fragmentary now, and carefully protected from any yobbish stone throwing by panels mounted outside the windows.
There are some splendid monuments. Margaret, wife of Haynes Barlie by whom he had issue fower sonnes and nyne daughters, six of them dyed in theire infancy the last was still borne, herself died five days after the birth and after nearly sisteen years of marriage, in 1653. Fourteen pregnancies in sixteen years, it's scarcely surprising. Her monument shows a round faced woman with ringlets each side of her head, below which she kneels opposite her husband, their six surviving children kneeling behind them, and behind them seven skulls, five smaller ones with the women and two larger behind the men. All the kneeling figures have one hand clasped to their breast, except for the surviving son who is holding what looks like a large bap. Next to Margaret's monument is one to Mary, second wife of Haynes Barley Esq. by whom he had a very plentiful fortune but no issue. She too has a round face and ringlets, and died in 1658. Haynes Barlee himself seems to have survived until 1696 when he died at the age of 90, having taken a third wife Mary, who produced four more sons, according to a monument erected in 1747.
There is supposed to be the remains of a pre Conquest motte and bailey castle (one of only four in England) by the church, but I must admit I didn't see it. I did like the garden tap and three galvanised watering cans on a little stand by the entrance to the churchyard, for people to tend the flowers on the graves.
The Systems Administrator and I don't do pub lunches very often. In fact, we only do them when we are on holiday. The rest of the time we are too busy to interupt the flow of the day going out to lunch. Plus, an awful lot of pubs offer food nowadays, and a lot of the time it is considerably less good than we could make at home, for an amount of money that would keep us in ingredients for lunch for the best part of the whole week. We try to avoid pubs that look as though they are doing bad food cheaply, though we have made some wrong calls, or found ourselves in places where that seemed to be the only option. There are also pubs that do bad food for moderate amounts of money, OK food for middling prices, lunches that are OK but frankly expensive, and occasionally good food for quite a lot of money. Rarely is food excellent and moderately priced, and as for good and cheap, it don't exist.
Today's pub was chosen in rather a rush, since my friend had recently returned from holiday visiting family in the States to a mountain of work, and I had staggered home from Day Three in the Plant Centre to find my laptop was doing a monster update and had a Hal-like attitude to my using the internet that evening (I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that). The Cricketers at Clavering featured in my (2006) pub food guide and my friend's more up to date (2010) one, and it looked easy to find starting from either Colchester or London N1. It is also famous for being run by Jamie Oliver's parents, and is where young Jamie started his career. The name above the door is still Trevor Oliver, and the pub merits brown tourist signs from the point where you leave (or in my case cross) the M11. On that basis, although we hadn't booked a table in advance, I took the precaution of booking one in person as soon as I arrived. This turned out to be the correct call, as by the time my friend arrived they were fully booked. That's good going for a Friday in August. The S.A. and I went to a Suffolk pub with a foodie reputation last August (it was our wedding anniversary) and there were only two or three other tables occupied.
The Cricketers at Clavering has a lot of beams, most of which I think are structural, and a cheerful attitude, with large wine glasses set on the tables and purple cushions, that's more posh Essex than rural Herefordshire. The staff were jolly and kindly, if quite keen to rush us through ordering and then clearing the plates, and the food was pretty nice and quite expensive. I ate mackeral salad with beetroot and horseradish, since the S.A. detests mackeral so I might as well eat it when I'm out, and I'm a sucker for beetroot and horseradish (it's my Polish roots). My friend had a large piece of sea bass she said was good. Her daugher and daugher's friend had smoked salmon sandwiches which came with chips on the side, and I had some of those as well, as the girls said we could, and were loads of them. The grownups had cherry pie which was a bit too sweet, and the girls refused pudding (such self control). As half the party were driving and the other half were under-age we were on soft drinks. This is one of the reasons why the S.A. and I tend to only bother with pubs when we are on holiday and not about to get into a car, since one of the real pleasures of a pub visit is cask ale, well kept. Anyway, I hadn't seen my friend for a while, and it was a good lunch, and a perfectly nice pub, though I wouldn't drive fifty miles to get to it unless I were meeting somebody.
The rest of the party headed back to town after lunch. I think they had another visit to make on the way home, and were keen to return to the more respectable parts of London N1 before any Friday evening riots kicked off. I went to have a look at the church, on the basis that I don't visit that side of the county very often, and I wanted to make the most of it. Clavering church doesn't get a mention in Simon Jenkins' book of churches, but sounded worth a look from my preliminary web search, and merits a brief mention in my County Guide to English Churches (Jones and Tricker, 1992, Countryside Books).
The church is tucked down a small side road with absolutely no parking whatsoever. Goodness knows what they do for weddings. I backed up just in time, and parked in a residential street off the main road, but there didn't seem to be a car park anywhere near the church, or even a field you could use. The church backs on to farmland, and feels peaceful and secluded. In these times of theft and vandalism it is rather wonderful that it remains open, since there was nobody else there throughout my visit. There has been a church on the site since Saxon times, but the present structure was built in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Perpendicular style. I think the Victorians had a bit of a go at it, but it still has the original roof, and doesn't look obviously mucked about with. It is small but charming, the outside mostly flint, with a low tower. The interior is fine, plain, and somehow manages to look bigger than the outside. Having read up on it in advance, and armed with my book, I knew to note the thirteenth century Purbeck marble font (octagonal, very plainly decorated with arches), the Elizabethan pulpit (wooden, carved with flowers) and the fifteenth century screen (rather worm eaten).
Neither the book nor the websites I consulted made any mention of the carved figures along the roof. They have bare heads with shoulder length curly hair, wear tunics that are long at the back and short at the front and what look like leggings, textured to resemble either feathers or chain mail. The light wasn't very good by then and I couldn't honestly see. They seemed to have bare feet. Maybe they are angels. Perhaps they originally had wings, which have been lost or removed for safety purposes? There is some fifteenth century stained glass along the north aisle, fragmentary now, and carefully protected from any yobbish stone throwing by panels mounted outside the windows.
There are some splendid monuments. Margaret, wife of Haynes Barlie by whom he had issue fower sonnes and nyne daughters, six of them dyed in theire infancy the last was still borne, herself died five days after the birth and after nearly sisteen years of marriage, in 1653. Fourteen pregnancies in sixteen years, it's scarcely surprising. Her monument shows a round faced woman with ringlets each side of her head, below which she kneels opposite her husband, their six surviving children kneeling behind them, and behind them seven skulls, five smaller ones with the women and two larger behind the men. All the kneeling figures have one hand clasped to their breast, except for the surviving son who is holding what looks like a large bap. Next to Margaret's monument is one to Mary, second wife of Haynes Barley Esq. by whom he had a very plentiful fortune but no issue. She too has a round face and ringlets, and died in 1658. Haynes Barlee himself seems to have survived until 1696 when he died at the age of 90, having taken a third wife Mary, who produced four more sons, according to a monument erected in 1747.
There is supposed to be the remains of a pre Conquest motte and bailey castle (one of only four in England) by the church, but I must admit I didn't see it. I did like the garden tap and three galvanised watering cans on a little stand by the entrance to the churchyard, for people to tend the flowers on the graves.
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