Open Writing

One of the most satisfying sentences I read last week, concerned famous gourmet Egon Ronay and his being turned away from an Ullswater hotel! It was nothing personal – there just wasn’t any room for him, they were full up.

But I’d love to have been the one to tell him. ‘Sorry, we can’t do with you today dear, too busy.’

One day in the future when I open my exclusive tea-rooms, somewhere in Lakeland or maybe the Dales, I look forward to the honour of giving some food critic the full up sign. Food is such an individualistic institution I abhor the idea of one man’s taste being able to influence a nation’s eating habits.

I haven’t started looking yet for my tumbledown cottage, with an acre or two of land to keep hubby happy, while I am busy in the kitchen – he will provide the veg for our summer tables. We shan’t serve anything too fancy, ours will be a sort of homely ‘Mrs B’s Pantry’ with home-baked bread and home-made jam and fresh cream oozing from oven-warm scones. Perhaps in my old age, I could learn to love a cow, or at least learn to watch my husband milk one, then we could be almost independent.

My herbal teas, lime and mint, would be another speciality, and I would take a few bookings for dinners on certain evenings when I wasn’t gourmeting around the hotel restaurants myself, picking up ideas that is. I shall have a sign saying ‘Dogs, hikers and children most welcome,’ with little doggy hitch-up posts attached to all my tables in the garden. In my dreams of course, it is perpetual dine-in-the-garden weather, all animals would be fed on fresh scraps, no canned food in my pantry.

I may take non-pet owners if I like the look of them, but the management reserves the right to refuse admission to anyone I don’t like the look of. While you wait for your meal, why not take a stroll around my husband’s chrysanths or pick your own fruit? In winter when we are tired of cruising the oceans, then we will retire to our little cottage, where I can get on with my latest book on ‘How we opened our first tea garden.’ Well, that’s my dream.

You remember what Bloody Mary sang in South Pacific – ‘You gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?’

I know many couples are fearful about the future, ‘what if one of us dies?’ and all that. Well, at least you will have had the pleasure of a mutual dream, whether it materialises or not. No one can take that away, is the way I look at it. Like looking forward to a holiday, often the anticipation is more exciting than the actuality.

Of course my husband makes protest noises from time to time. He seems to think I don’t take the financial side seriously enough. But as I keep telling my father when he isn’t tripping off on holiday, or buying new radios – I can’t wait to get on that pension.

Cooking is one of my favourite pastimes and talking to strangers another. Combine these with a winter full of writing – who could ask for more? But he probably got the idea of becoming rich overnight, from a Leeds hotel where we were wedding guests once. The reception food was so fabulous we couldn’t wait for breakfast, the following morning.

Unfortunately, he read the small print first and immediately avoided the hyper-expensive three-course breky. We made do with the continental at £2.75 which consisted of tenpence worth of cereal, a pot of coffee, and as many croissants as you could eat!

But if – say in another ten years time you are strolling in the Dales, worn and weary, looking for a good cup of tea and a wholesome wedge of home cooked meat and potato pie - why not look us up? Just follow your nose and the sound of yapping dogs!