Lunch: The Outside Chance at Manton (Sunday 24/09/2017)
Its a good friend who will drive 60 miles to meet you for lunch when you already live close enough to shout abuse at each other from an upstairs window.
Its an even better one who will split the lunch bill evenly without a murmur of dissent, when blatantly you out ate them by a ratio of four to three.
Everybody had news.
M has a second due imminently and had evidently reached the state of weary resignation of someone who would rather be in February, be it this year or next.
P revealed a return to writing and drip fed tantalising titbits that didn't make it entirely clear whether she was penning top class or merely top shelf literature.
The children played hide and seek to a standard usually reserved for those who don't really understand the rules and were further hampered by the absence of any adequate cover behind or beneath which to hide; this and a tendency to wander out of concealment at regular intervals, to announce that they had yet to be discovered. The older ones took it all in good spirits and it was a surprisingly long time before they opted to climb a tree to escape the futility of it all.
The young ones dutifully fell from height, tripped on twigs and exchanged blows. They studiously ignored every effort that the adults made to prevent eyes being skewered on the pointy ends of sharpened sticks and they brandished them recklessly like a Golden Ticket to the Willy Wonka Eye Hospital.
Lunch was an excellent variety of moist and tasty roasts at the pleasingly horsey themed 'Outside Chance' in Manton, on the outskirts of Marlborough. A confusion over timings led to us being kindly but firmly edged into the beer garden as I was scooping the last mouthfuls from my plate. That we had to make way for a later reservation was understandable; that I had to fight a tug of war with the dishwasher for the remnants of my Yorkshire Pudding was not.
After draining our drinks and preparing to head back to Bristol in something as close to a convoy as two cars can manage, we took a spontaneous diversion to Avebury to celebrate the recent renewal of our National Trust membership and to inspect the famous but mysterious stone rings.
This represents a policy shift.
Those brown signs on the motorway are there for a reason.
Its an even better one who will split the lunch bill evenly without a murmur of dissent, when blatantly you out ate them by a ratio of four to three.
Everybody had news.
M has a second due imminently and had evidently reached the state of weary resignation of someone who would rather be in February, be it this year or next.
P revealed a return to writing and drip fed tantalising titbits that didn't make it entirely clear whether she was penning top class or merely top shelf literature.
The children played hide and seek to a standard usually reserved for those who don't really understand the rules and were further hampered by the absence of any adequate cover behind or beneath which to hide; this and a tendency to wander out of concealment at regular intervals, to announce that they had yet to be discovered. The older ones took it all in good spirits and it was a surprisingly long time before they opted to climb a tree to escape the futility of it all.
The young ones dutifully fell from height, tripped on twigs and exchanged blows. They studiously ignored every effort that the adults made to prevent eyes being skewered on the pointy ends of sharpened sticks and they brandished them recklessly like a Golden Ticket to the Willy Wonka Eye Hospital.
Lunch was an excellent variety of moist and tasty roasts at the pleasingly horsey themed 'Outside Chance' in Manton, on the outskirts of Marlborough. A confusion over timings led to us being kindly but firmly edged into the beer garden as I was scooping the last mouthfuls from my plate. That we had to make way for a later reservation was understandable; that I had to fight a tug of war with the dishwasher for the remnants of my Yorkshire Pudding was not.
After draining our drinks and preparing to head back to Bristol in something as close to a convoy as two cars can manage, we took a spontaneous diversion to Avebury to celebrate the recent renewal of our National Trust membership and to inspect the famous but mysterious stone rings.
This represents a policy shift.
Those brown signs on the motorway are there for a reason.
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