Milly Mossop

And now for an interesting fact about Swallows

When swallows fly high, the weather will be fine. They're catching insects in the air, and the higher the insects, the drier the sky. So says Farmer Oscar.

Farmer Oscar also says he doesn't know about cows lying down when it's going to rain, but he does know that they go to the highest part of the field when it's not going to rain. Presumably to catch some rays I suggested, but he didn't like to speculate.

The Inn at Freshford, Bath

If you've been paying attention you may have clocked that my good friend Kitty got hitched last month. 07/07/07 to be precise, which I guess makes her and Mr Kitty very, very, very lucky.

I don't want you to blub over your keyboard so I'll spare you a detailed description of the heart stopping romance of the day, of the palpable love that filled the church and lifted the roof from the rafters, and the ear to ear perma-grins of the congregation.

No, I'll tell you about the pub instead.

The reception wasn't actually in the Inn at Freshford , it was in a marquee in Frisky's Field next door. But naturally one doesn't want to be late for a wedding, and since the pub is less than a 5 minute walk from St Peter's Church, almost everyone congregated in the Inn beforehand.

This is a classic English country pub, surrounded by fields, with a river gurgling just over there, and a large, safe beer garden for children to run riot in (not usually a criteria for me, but thought it worth mentioning in case it is for you).

Of particular note however, is the home brewed beer - Tunnel Vision - or at least the Inn at Freshford Manager also runs the Box Steam Brewery (a micro brewery) that brews it. Or something. To be honest I had to google quite extensively just to find that, all I remembered was an excellent ale that came with a matching T-shirt, and some marketing blurb behind the bar.

Also of particular note, now I come to think of it, was the outstanding professionalism of the main bar tender, who may well have been the landlady, or at least manageress. In the face of probably 50+ wedding guests, all gagging to get their last liquid sustenance before a dry patch in church, and a never ending trail of ramblers - many of whom, to my intense and unjustified frustration, ordered tea and coffee - this lady never stopped smiling, helping and serving. Later in the day I saw her personally escort an elderly customer to his car and wave him off before returning to the bar catching an order as she went. As impressive to me as juggling with no hands.

All in all, a perfect wedding, a perfect marriage, a perfect day, and a perfect pub? Perhaps too perfect. Nothing wrong with a few laughter lines and silver hairs. And after all, with so much perfection everywhere else that day, the bar was raised very high indeed.

The Royal Oak, Lower Bristol Road, Bath: PERFECT PUB CONTENDER ALERT

Often when Mozz and I are whizzing round country lanes in Wales, Shropshire, or wherever we might be, I encourage him to explore an especially tiny road-to-nowhere looking lane - not (just) because I want to test his tolerance and the savvy of Tom Tom lady, but because it is my firm belief that the holy grail, the Perfect Pub, hides down such a lane.

So it is with a mixture of confusion and confidence that I'm bumping The Royal Oak in Bath into, thus far, the top 5 of Best British Pubs. It's a pub in a city. Albeit on the edge of a quite diddy, picturesque city and equally on the edge of stunning countryside.

Keeping to a theme from the last post, I've skipped a month or so to the night before Kitty's wedding to the talented and charming Mr Kitty, more of which to come in the next post.

A gang of five of us, Mozz, me, Gandolf, Rhino and my brother Pinkerton, had begun our journey from London with high hopes of being in Bath by tea time (aka beer time). 2 punctured tyres and several very tiresome hours of arguing with the car hire firm later, we eventually arrived in time for last orders.

It being July in Bath, and me not being terribly organised, we were staying in a small B&B outside the city centre - luckily however, as we rounded the final (ish) corner to our destination, Pinkerton spotted a sign on the side of a pub that heralded 'CAMRA pub of the year 2007' and hope tugged at our hearts like new born pups on their mother's teat.

After a swift check in at Ashley Villa (clean, sufficient, great value) we trotted down the hill and over the bridge to the Royal Oak.

What an array of ales! And what a perfect beer garden (especially for post 01/07 smokers). And what an agreeable extended licensing hour on Friday!

I wish I could tell you the ales we had, as they were all full of character and amusingly named. Perhaps Pinkerton could help me out here with a comment?..

I've always said that perfect pubs are circumstantial; what is perfect one day may not be the next, and indeed after our arduous journey perhaps a Wetherspoons would have felt perfect. So just to be sure, we returned to The Royal Oak on Sunday for a quick beer, and found it had lost none of its charm. Maybe charm isn't the right word though - a quaint, ivy clad, licensed stone cottage in Oldeworldville this ain't. But for a wide range (10 pumps) of locally brewed and guest ales, knowledgeable bar staff who demonstrably enjoy their work rather than suffer it, and modest but generous decor and furnishings, this place really can't be bettered.

My only regret is that we inadvertently, but briefly, upset the landlord - a mishap involving a full ashtray and his recently planted herb garden - and if he's reading this I can only apologise again on behalf of the five dickheads from London sitting under the patio heater. Friendliness soon resumed though, and that's further credit to the hospitality of this superb example of how a pub should be stocked and run.

The Sloop Inn, Bantham, Devon

A visit to The Sloop Inn in Bantham, Devon, was part of a hen weekend for Kitty planned perfectly by her bridesmaid, a Bantham local, and possibly the nicest girl you could meet.

This feels like a particularly outdated review because since we went there, Kitty has got married, come back from honeymoon, and had three kittens (last part may not be true). Anyway, it was back in June.

There's really just 5 things you need to know about The Sloop Inn, in no particular order:

1. It's a proper, settle-in-for-the-afternoon, wash your worries away with beer and banter pub
2. It's a long way from Clapham so you'd need to be in the area to contemplate going
3. From what I could tell (although bear in mind I was in a party of 20 hens) they're not in need of a marketing push (custom seemed pretty healthy)
4. Which kinda gets me off the hook because my custom extended to ordering 20 Sambuca shots and leaving very soon after - I'm afraid I couldn't even tell you what ale was on
5. However I'm hoping my otherwise comprehensive and informed critique of other pubs puts me in enough credit to say with credible confidence "this is a great pub. If you're within 15 miles of it and don't pay a visit you need your head testing. Or your Sat Nav."

I've just remembered another pub that we walked to earlier that day - and when I say walked, I don't mean we tottered across the road in our kitten heels (though in fairness that's how we arrived at the Sloop) - no, we trekked the coastline for 2 hours in each direction. Longer coming back, because a few of us decided to try the last stretch cross country, only to find a sequence of fields that interconnect on Rubik cube levels of complexity. Devon farmers really don't make trespass easy.

Anyway, that other pub, which we eventually arrived at, weary but happy, like cussing Enid Blyton characters, was The Hope and Anchor, in Hope Cove.

Again, this isn't really a pub I can do justice given the circumstances of our visit (we were too busy wondering how much of a tit we could make of Kitty later that evening -turns out, a lot of a tit, bless her incredibly up-for-it socks), but I'm more than happy to give it the Milly seal of approval, for what it's worth.

It was busy, so the food was slow, but then anyone who goes to the Devon coast in summer expecting a personalised, speedy service should be put in stocks and thoroughly laughed at. The food when it came was average, which for a very busy tourist pub is a bonus, the beer was fine (ok, I had Magners, so shoot me), and generally it fitted the bill for a pub at the end of a bracing walk. A drink, a fisherman's pie or similar, and you're ready to walk back again.

The Sloop Inn though, now that's a pub you wouldn't want to walk away from.

Happy Birthday Mozz!

Sorry I left you in bed, I couldn't sleep (probably because of too much sleep over the last 4 days) and the sun looked so bright and pretty so I wanted to go outside and take photos of the dawn of your birthday.
But I only got as far as 3 photos of the back field before the battery went flat. So now I'm waiting for it to charge and really hoping the cow I want to take a photo of (I think it's Sarah) stays where she is for a little longer. The light looks amazing, spreading over the valley.
Then I thought I'd do a little bit of blogging whilst the mood caught me, but I haven't forgotten it's your birthday. I'll bring you a special mug of birthday tea and maybe a little present a bit later on.
Thank you for being, always, the best thing in my life! W;) x

I blame the name Hugh

Hello. Remember me? Alter ego of struggling writer, likes pubs, yay high. It's been a while; I know, I know, you're not angry. You're disappointed.

So, first of all, we moved house, and I got a new job but, hang on, I blamed this last time didn't I. Time for a new scapegoat.

Hughs. All of them. With their witty asides, their pig rearing panache and their contempt for human kindness. I refer of course to Messrs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who first got me hooked on four series(I mean how greedy and self indulgent can one small holder be?) of River Cottage and his partner in crime Hugh Laurie, AKA Dr. Gregory House. And we're not even half way through series two of that.
I also heap a generous lashing of blame on Amazon who always seem to 'have recommendations' for me. I mean how jolly kind. As if looking after a big, eccentric house and culinarily challenged boyfriend and holding down a job weren't enough, I now regularly receive emails alerting me to 50% discounts on the next series of the last programme I got addicted to.

It's like offering a smack addict, well, half price smack, if that's not too blunt a metaphor.

But the biggest tragedy in this tale of regret and woe is that I've been to some truly great character pubs in the last couple of months that I haven't shared. The Inn at Freshford, near Bath, for example. And just a couple of days ago the Old Miners Arms in a place most would recognise as The Middle Of Nowhere but which actually has a sign on it saying Priest Weston, Shropshire.

Before moving on to these gems (and the usual harem of try-hards in London) however, I need to wish a happy birthday to someone very special who I've left sleeping in bed.