The Elf on the Naughty Step

No idea, 17.6 units. Can that be right? Well, yes it can, unfortunately: three pints of beer with a journalist friend over lunch in a London gastro-pub around the back of where The Guardian used to be (I have sadly reached an age where every important landmark is where something used to be, rather than where it is). Then 10.5 units absorbed in the course of my evening, which was centred on a discussion dinner with Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, a lady with whom I expected to agree, and was not disappointed. One of my Bloke clubs organizes this sort of thing, and does it well – very well, in fact, considering how damnably difficult it must be to serve a perfectly decent meal to around 150 people at the same time.

Tradition seems to demand that I and my guest or guests are always seated as far as possible from the guest of honour. I don’t know why this should be as, to the best of my knowledge, I have never knowingly caused any trouble at these events. Well, I suppose there was the time that the former head of the Food Standards Agency came to talk to a room full of health neurotics, and my guests and I all lit up huge cigars. But then it was just before the smoking ban, so it was our last chance and something we needed to do so that we could talk about it to our grandchildren. Added to which, it was surely at least partly the club’s fault for festooning the tables with matches and ashtrays.

Tonight, our companions in furthest and darkest reaches of The Naughty Corner were a very jolly lady member and her charming mother (or sister, as my gallant guest insisted on designating her) so that was all right. As for Ms Chakrabarti, quite apart from the fact that I have agreed with 90-odd per cent of her public pronouncements to date, I warmed to the fact that dinner was black tie, since this is left to the choice of the speaker and self-righteous left-wing types nearly always specify “lounge suits” (Gordon Brown’s boorish insistence on turning up to black tie City dinners in this garb was one of many excellent reasons for hating him right from the start of his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer).

My guest was less sure about whether The Chakrabarti was a Good Thing, though he remarked on her “elfin” appearance in what I took to be a mark of approbation. Then he disappeared to make a telephone call in the short interlude between dinner and speeches, and returned completely charmed. For who should have been standing next to him on The Naughty Step at the front of the club but Ms Chakrabarti herself, smoking a soothing fag. What greater commitment to liberty could anyone show these days? Even better, she was such a good sport that she had a chat with my guest’s wife to back up his unlikely story that he was having a black tie dinner in St James’s rather than hanging around in some sleazy lap dancing bar.

Ms Chakrabarti took as her starting point the fact that she had turned up for dinner rather on the early side, wandered in and found a succession of people making her feel thoroughly welcome – which is pretty much the basis on which she would like to organize society as a whole. She is not a great fan of the alternative “Don’t you know who I am?” approach. It is always good to be reminded that it is a “great good fortune to be born in the oldest unbroken democracy on earth” – and these days the point seems to come most comfortably from the children of immigrants. She also made a number of other excellent points, but I can sense an old clubman breathing down my neck and muttering “Chatham House rules, old boy” so I suppose I had better not repeat them all here.

I am always a bit frustrated by the way that these sorts of events seem to take an age over the browsing and sluicing and then, as soon as the interesting bit starts, some bloke with a metaphorical stopwatch starts chivvying everyone to hurry along as time is running out and there are last trains to be caught. It’s as though the first two and half hours of the Today programme consisted of John Humphrys and Jim Naughtie exchanging polite small talk over a cracking breakfast, and all the political interviews had to be crammed into the last 30 minutes, at least 10 of which would be taken up by repetitions of “I’m really going to have to hurry you, as we have very little time”. Which sounds pretty much the way things are now, come to think of it. Maybe they should give that breakfast idea a go and see how it works out.

It all chimes in with my fundamental belief that most people who go to black tie dinners don’t actually want to hear a speaker at all. Certainly on the rare occasions when I speak at such events myself, I am ever conscious of members of the audience yawning, staring at their watches and generally giving top class imitations of being bored out of their skulls, and I have noted similar reactions to more talented, experienced and amusing speakers, too.

So why go at all, then? Attendance is not compulsory.

Ms Chakrabarti was unsurprised that questions were not along the lines of “What’s your favourite colour?” and dealt in what I thought was a masterly fashion with the chestnut about the permissibility of torturing the bloke who had planted a nuclear bomb in St Paul’s Cathedral, to get him to reveal the secret code to stop the countdown (someone been watching too many BBC films, I fear). And you know you’re in a club with proper chaps when one of them claims that the country is overcrowded, and the chosen measure is that he can no longer find space to park his yacht in Lymington Harbour. Ah well, at least it must be easier to send the buggers back when they have come in their own boat. Well worth the trip to London and the price of admission for that alone, to be honest. And I got a newspaper column out of it, too.

Unpronounceable Concluded

15st 7lb, 2.0 units. After another cracking breakfast, we departed Unpronounceable Hall, wondering among other things:

(a) Why it called itself Unpronounceable Hall rather than the more appropriate Unpronounceable Cottage? Or, at a push, Unpronounceable House?

(b) Why an outfit charging an eye-watering £445 per night for dinner, bed and breakfast felt the need to try and scam another fiver per night when submitting the final bill?

(c) Who thought it was a good idea to decorate our room with rather naff embossed wallpaper and then cover it in the sort of bright red paint that would have been dismissed by Royal Mail as too garish for their pillar boxes?

(d) Why anyone would consider that the three small plastic bottles of hand wash, body wash and shampoo in our bathroom constituted an adequate supply of toiletries for a supposed “luxury country house hotel”?

(e) Why, if the hotel grounds extended to 14 acres, as claimed on their website, it was possible to make a complete circuit of them in little more than five minutes, without breaking sweat?

(f) Why they did not make it slightly clearer on the aforementioned website that the “highly trained therapists” who were “on hand” for spa “treatments” (Blodywn from the village, no doubt) had to be booked 24 – 48 hours in advance?

(g) Why the claim on their website that Unpronounceable Hall was a favourite resort of Queen Victoria, her very own secret hideaway where she personally supervised the planting of the trees, appeared unsupported by … well, anyone else at all, so far as I can see.  Although I am ordinarily too modest to mention it, I do have a first class honours degree in history (awarded in the days when firsts were not ten a penny) and I did specialize in 19th and 20th century British history, while always maintaining a snobbish interest in the monarchy. And to the best of my recollection, Queen Victoria loved Balmoral, the Isle of Wight, the south of France and Saxe-Coburg in Germany. But Wales? Nope, never heard so much as a whisper of that. I shan’t believe a word of it unless and until they can persuade an unimpeachable authority of the calibre of Stephen Fry to lend his support.

(h) Why they displayed by their reception desk a collection of black and white photos of “celebrity” visitors which, in most cases, not only meant nothing to me and Mrs H but also to the hotel staff. My favourite was of a bloke who Mrs H thought looked vaguely familiar. Eventually the receptionist ventured that “he was in Porridge”. But he wasn’t Ronnie Barker, Richard Beckinsale, Fulton Mackay or Brian Wilde, and he certainly didn’t look like the shot-putting Jock off the front of the Scott’s porage oats packets, so I was none the wiser. When pressed on his qualification for entry to this hall of fame, she replied “He lives around here”.

Don’t get me wrong. We enjoyed our little break and the food was absolutely first class. We just left wondering about some of these little quirks, while I felt the pain of the bill almost physically.

I decided that we would drive north up the beautiful Welsh coast, mainly because I had failed to appreciate that almost every square inch of it is devoted to an extended caravan park. Still, at least this gave me a chance to revisit Barmouth and that long, rusty and remarkably rickety railway bridge, for which I have a very soft spot.

Mrs H in best terrorist mufti in the most vulnerable spot on the Cambrian Coast line

Mrs H without the Arctic wind in her face, looking marginally less menacing

Love that bridge

We then drove for some time in search of a public lavatory. I came to the conclusion that they must camouflage them and take the signs away outside the tourist season, like the Home Guard burying signposts in an attempt to confuse invading Germans. Because of the difficulty in driving with one’s legs crossed, I was finally persuaded to stop near what appeared to be a reasonably promising pub. Crossing the Cambrian Coast railway line on foot, we tiptoed into what appeared to be an almost totally empty establishment, until we spotted a bloke energetically getting outside his lunch in a corner of the otherwise deserted bar. He was evidently as surprised to see us as we were to see him. Perhaps it was the fullness of his mouth that prevented him from saying “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, look you” as Mrs H opened the door marked “Toilets” and found herself being stared at by approximately 30 open-mouthed geriatrics, all neatly arranged in a circle as though they were in the day room of a maximum security twilight home. As no doubt they usually were, except on Mondays when the lunch-eating bloke took them out in his bus for a little trip to the pub, so that the management could make a no doubt doomed attempt to hose the day room down to do something about the smell of wee. We made an excuse and left, as they always used to say in the News of the World. But we did have a wee first. In the lavatories, too, which is probably more than most of their customers that day could hope to manage. I would gladly have bought a couple of unwanted drinks as a quid pro quo if there had been anyone behind the bar to serve them. Later we stopped to have lunch in Harlech, in the one establishment in the town where the staff did not look likely to drug us and place us in a wicker man as potential sacrifices.

Pretty, them hills: a pity they're in Wales, obviously

Harlech's defences: no match for braying English Ladies Who Lunch

It was full of PLU (People Like Us) Englishwoman braying at the tops of their voices. Actually, there were only four of them occupying a single table, but they were the only other customers and they did rather dominate the place. At least if the locals turned nasty, we reckoned that the Ladies Who Lunch deserved to be first in line. We drove back through Blaenau Ffestiniog. Very bleak, Blaenau Ffestiniog, as Noel Coward would surely have observed if he had ever ventured that way. But, who knows, perhaps he kept a secret love nest in the place. Just like Queen Victoria allegedly did by the Dovey estuary …

From Unpron-Ounceable to Afterborth

No idea, 6.0 units. Unpronounceable Hall proved to be surrounded by the RSPB’s Unpron-Ounceable Bird Reserve, so it seemed churlish not to take a look at it. A woman in a wooden hut, made cosy by a wood-burning stove, asked us if we had ever considered joining the RSPB and I somehow managed to avoid getting into a row by simply saying “no”, rather than explaining that the only birds I actually gave a toss about were the songbirds in my garden, while the RSPB in my neck of the woods seemed to be obsessively interested only in the bloody great things that occasionally swooped down and ate them. Mrs H handed over £3 for each of us and we shuffled off around this bird-watcher’s paradise, in which we saw … a robin, a blackbird, a couple of distant swans, a small flock of Canada geese and something that was either a small gull or a big duck. I was glad I had not made a special trip. Every now and then we entered a wooden hide, in which families were sitting in quasi-religious silence staring intently at … well, probably nothing at all, to be honest. Very like church in every respect, then.

The view from a bird hide: note total absence of birds

After this we drove in search of a beach, and accidentally found ourselves driving through a shithole called Borth, which must be the shittiest seaside shithole I have ever come across in the United Kingdom, even including Filey and Newbiggin-by-the-Sea. And probably Sellafield, come to that. They should rename it Afterborth and give it a decent burial under the sand. Still, the beach further north was nice when we finally worked out how to get there, and the walk along it suitably bracing. It even gave us an appetite for dinner, though we were not so rash as to attempt the Tasting Menu two nights in a row.

Beach, Mrs H, Dovey estuary, Aberdovey (in order of distance from camera)

Look you, isn't it?

No idea, 12.0 units. Maybe Shropshire has been cunningly placed by the Wales Tourist Board to make visitors feel good about crossing the border. Despite the minor annoyance of having the road signs in gibberish, it looked very pretty under its light dusting of snow. With Northumberland in mind, and in particular the fact that there is now only one petrol station in Alnwick and none in Rothbury, I stopped to fill the car up with petrol in Welshpool; we then passed a filling station every five miles or so all the way to our final destination. I failed to suppress my boyish excitement at driving alongside the track of the Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway, but luckily Mrs H has already made the mistake of marrying me, and there is no getting out of it now even on the solid grounds that I might be a bit of a train nerd.

We finally crunched up the gravel of Unpronounceable Hall at teatime, to be greeted by a diminutive Frenchman who missed a potential joke by introducing himself as the deputy rather than the under manager. He showed us up to a room called Hogarth, allowing Mrs H to ask whether they were all named after roundabouts, and he laughed as though he hadn’t heard that one before. It contained the only four poster bed in the hotel, apparently, which would have been good news but for the fact that it made it a bit too dark to read the book I had brought with me, Anthony Trollope’s An Old Man’s Love (guess the reasons for that choice) and Mrs H spent both nights desperately clinging to the side to avoid rolling into the huge cavity that opened up in its middle and threatened to absorb her forever. On the other hand, when they brought us some tea they proved to bake their own biscuits and they were out of this world, raising high and well-founded hopes for dinner.

A modest snack this, comprising:

1. Some canapés with our aperitifs, including a battered anchovy with a sweet chilli dipping sauce, a beetroot mousse with smoked salmon, and half a quail’s egg with tartare sauce (which sounds really peculiar, but was delicious).

2. A pre-starter of tomato jelly, smoked salmon and crab bisque, accompanied by a glass of Bollinger.

3. A starter of squab pigeon with French saucisson and foie gras, served with spiced puy lentils and accompanied by a glass of Chilean sauvignon blanc.

4. A second starter of ballotine of pork with langoustine, artichoke, baby carrot, quail’s egg and cider vinaigrette, accompanied by a glass of Beaujolais.

5. A third starter of cod with scallops on curried new potato with onion puree and shallot crisps, accompanied by a glass of Argentinian Torrontes.

6. A main course of an assiette of Welsh black beef, comprising fillet on aubergine puree with sugar snap peas, sweetbread on spinach, shin ravioli and a samosa with Asian spices, accompanied by a fine 1998 claret.

7. A selection of a mere 14 cheeses, with a glass of Dow’s port.

8. A “pre-dessert” of ginger ice cream with apricot puree and – shock, horror – no wine.

9. A proper pudding of pumpkin seed soufflé with a warm chocolate sauce, accompanied by a sweet Soave from the Veneto.

To be fair, the portions were small enough for us not to feel nauseous as we sipped our peppermint tea in the drawing room afterwards, though we would probably have exploded like Monty Python’s Mr Creosote if anyone had been so foolish as to offer us a final wafer-thin mint. We concluded that (a) we had dined extraordinarily well and (b) the Michelin star was thoroughly deserved, though wondering (c) how it could be commercially viable to employ a Michelin-starred chef to cook dinner for just four couples in the middle of nowhere.

Hedge funs

15st 6lb, 2.0 units. About six weeks ago, Mrs H and I agreed that (childcare arrangements permitting), this weekend would be an appropriate occasion on which to mark Valentine’s Day, Mrs H’s birthday and our first wedding anniversary, all of which fell in the weeks before or after. Originally Mrs H had grand ideas of whisking us off to one of the Balearic Islands to toast our anniversary in a Michelin-starred restaurant, but that fell down because of my extreme reluctance to face airport security and / or a budget airline, so the choice was left to me. Bearing in mind how the weather has been of late, I drew a notional 100-mile circle around our Cheshire home to determine the maximum bearable driving time, and started looking for luxury hotels at bargain prices. I rapidly discovered that those two concepts are not natural bedfellows. I was mainly looking at the Lake District, wondering how we could possibly have as much fun there as Joe and Gail McIntyre from Coronation Street, and shuddering at the expense, when for some reason I happened across the sister hotel of one such establishment out in the far west of Wales. And, by the happiest coincidence, that very day it had just been awarded a Michelin star, which rang a bell. In the circumstances, it did not seem all that expensive so I made a swift internet booking and congratulated myself on a job well done, telling Mrs H that I would be whisking her off to a secret location for a weekend of pampering.

Scroll forward six weeks to yesterday and I finally clicked open the confirmation e-mail from the hotel (which I had moved out of my regular inbox in case Mrs H stumbled across it and ruined her surprise) and read it properly. It was at this point that I finally registered the critical words “per night” immediately after the price, which had seemed costly but bearable for a couple of days. But the thing was, in fact, going to cost double what I had imagined, and we could probably have had a sodding week in a 4* in Majorca for the same money. Bollocks. I was so pissed off that I confessed my stupidity to Mrs H when I got home, which thoroughly spoilt the surprise but at least got her adjusted to what was in store, viz a weekend in the middle of nowhere eating too much while I wore a face that looked like someone was taking £50 notes out of my wallet and burning them in front of me.

We drove through Shropshire, along a road neither of us knew, and very pretty it was, too. Only here we discovered that they like to flail the hedges using giant tractors in convoy, facing the traffic in their direction of travel. I stopped and watched two of these huge machines advancing relentlessly towards us, their drivers’ eyes fixed rigidly on the hedge rather than road ahead, with Mrs H murmuring “He’s not going to stop, you know” followed by “Sound the horn!” I did no such thing, partly because I had observed that there was a gap in the hedge which should bring him to a halt shortly before he started driving over our car like something out of one of those Giant Trucks programmes. And so it proved. What resulted was a stand off, with the tractor driver and us staring at each other and neither party moving. I could not go round him because we were on a hill with double white lines down the middle of the road, and every so often a car going the other way popped over the blind summit doing 50 or 60mph, and a head-on collision with one of those would really have taken the shine off my weekend. Eventually I had to despatch Mrs H from the car to walk round the tractors and signal whether it was safe to pass them. As I finally did so, I was able to treat the tractor drivers to the traditional two-fingered salute, which brought one of them instantly leaping from his cab. Whether this was so that he could helpfully replace Mrs H in the road and provide signals to the queue of traffic that had built up behind us, or in the hope of punching my teeth so far down my throat that I would have to deploy a toothbrush up my backside in future, I could not say for sure. Though I could certainly take an educated guess.

Very pretty county, Shropshire, though I don’t think it’s going to be high on my list of places to visit again. Particularly after the whole tractor experience was followed by a visit to a village store to pick up a sandwich for lunch, a process that took so long on account of the mental incapacity of the staff and their other customers that it might well have been quicker to sow the wheat ourselves, harvest and mill it …

Mixed krill

15st 4lb, 2.0 units. Mrs H’s birthday. I thought I had prepared for this quite well, until it emerged in conversation last night that Mrs H was hoping to receive two presents from her small immediate family: one from her husband and one from The Baby. Perhaps it is because he hasn’t been well, or perhaps it’s just because he’s never been around on Mummy’s birthday before, but the thoughtless little sod hadn’t remembered to buy her anything, even though I know for a fact that he has over £700 in his own account in a top London bank. It’s just self, self, self with some people, isn’t it?

It was a stroke of luck, in the circumstances, that I had happened to spot a birthday card showing a baby’s hands mawkishly holding out a heart with “Mum” engraved on it when I was buying my own birthday card at Fenwick’s of Bond Street last week, and had bought it so that we could share a laugh at such execrable taste. Now I hastily regrouped and wrote a loving message in it on The Baby’s behalf.

I handed the two cards over with a bracelet from Tiffany that they had kept firmly hidden under the counter and only produced, with an inadequately suppressed shudder, when I threatened to give such a detailed description of it, from a fleeting glimpse I had enjoyed on the internet, that it risked putting off their other and more important customers. Still, Mrs H seemed to like it. Which was good. The hallmarks were a bit too small for me to decipher, but it looked distinctly silver and I take encouragement from the fact that her arm has not turned green so far.

I took Mrs H and The Baby ought for a slap-up lunch at the finest pub restaurant in the area, regardless of expense and only slightly resentful of the fact that The Baby’s bank has so far failed to supply him with a debit card. Mrs H ate lobster and steak, a combination which has always seemed a Step Too Far to me. I had a mixed grill, thinking that really I should have gone for a mixed krill as I look and feel increasingly like a bloody whale.

Screams in the night

15st 4lb, 4.0 units. The Baby spent the night screaming. Mrs H spent the night comforting him. I, shamefully, spent the night sleeping fitfully in our fly-infested and dead-mouse-scented annexe above the garage, except during the all-too-frequent interruptions to relieve myself of scarcely believable quantities of liquid. A sure sign of diabetes, I seem to recall.
I discovered when I finally surfaced in the morning that I had only narrowly escaped an early hours summons to drive mother and Baby to A&E on account of his soaring temperature, until a consultation with NHS Direct and the patient’s subsequent response to the recommended infant-friendly analgesics had put Mrs H’s mind at rest. Since I rarely say anything positive about anyone or anything on these pages, it seems only fair to observe that Mrs H has been consistently impressed with the responsiveness of NHS Direct, and the quality of its staff and of the advice they offer.

It seemed only reasonable to try to assuage my aforementioned feelings of total uselessness by staying at home for the day to assist Mrs H, particularly given that The Baby steadfastly refused to be put down for a second, and this severely restricted her freedom of manoeuvre. We took him to The Doctor, who peered into all The Baby’s reasonably accessible orifices and concluded that his mild fever was consistent with … a cold, or something of the sort. Which seemed a bit hard, given that he has only just got over a cold, or something of the sort, but apparently there is a lot of it about.

Or it could be swine flu, of course, of which there is also a lot about in the area, apparently, though luckily presenting itself in a mild form rather than in the “bring out your dead” mass graves scenario so widely touted in the media last year. Nevertheless, we were advised that we would do well to consider the merits of vaccination if we had not already done so, and not merely because the Government has got millions of doses of vaccine with a diminishing shelf life that it is desperate to pump into people’s arms rather than dump in landfill.

Then again, The Baby’s temperature could be the precursor to something like chickenpox.

It was only after we left the surgery that I began to wonder what exactly we had gained over our previous understanding that The Baby was not very well but we did not really have a clue what was wrong with him.