Father's Day at The Running Horse

Anyone doubting the community or family spirit of modern Britain should have been trying to fight their way through the chattering crowd of grandpas, daddies, sons and baby grandchildren at The Running Horse enjoying Father's Day lunch service today.

Our party consisted of my husband, younger sons and my parents, but the huge noisy table behind us was easily 11 members of a multi generational family who as we left at 3pm were replaced by a second 'relay' for another family of 12. Heart warming and great for the hospitality trade!

The Running Horse in Littleton is a popular  village pub with rooms, that combines friendly pub/bar/beer garden (where dogs are welcome) with a smarter panelled dining area, both of which serve hearty contemporary  British fare.  On a weekday lunch there is a mouth watering selection of sandwiches including coronation chicken, and on a Sunday traditional roasts are added alongside such reliable favourites as prawn cocktail or charcuterie starters  and mains such as fish and chips,  burgers, smoked haddock gratin and wild mushroom tagliatelli.

The service even on such a frantic occasion was swift and friendly, and the chefs visibly toiling in the open kitchen responded with genuine smiles when  my husband waved and thanked them. However as

the mother of a trained waiter I could not help noticing that the waitress poured the (nice dry ) house wine all wrong, grasping it in both warming hands. My dad quoted his late bon viveur brother who used to say 'Hold a bottle by the bottom and a woman by the waist'...

A really pleasurable place for a meal at any time of the week who more than rose to a special occasion.  The free bottle of beer for every dad was the icing on the cake.

Monday Munchies: The Fox at Crawley

What a joy it is to see a decaying ruin given a shiny new face lift.  No,  I am not talking about taking my own tentative steps into The Last Chance Saloon of plastic surgery.  I am talking about the pub formerly known as The Fox and Hounds in the smart village of Crawley outside Winchester.

Until about two years ago its reputation, location and architectural attraction had gone down the drain by becoming a dingey, damp, mostly empty pub limping into oblivion, but in October 2018 the management of  the equally bright, contemporary Bugle Inn in Twyford (review to follow) took it over, called it The Fox, and have transformed it both inside and out as a  beautifully interior-designed destination gastro pub with rooms. 

The airy glass-roofed dining room has smart oak floors but the sound-proofing panels help to muffle my absolute pet-hate - echo and noise - retaining classy potential for functions of all sizes. The smaller, panelled dining room has a comfortable, intimate ambience. The bar between the two is not really spacious enough to prop up of an evening, but is an elegant holding pen while you wait for your table. In summer punters can overflow into the wrap-around outside courtyards.

Added publicity and star dust is sprinkled by the occasional appearance of the Chef Patron Lenny on our local celebrity James Martin's Saturday Morning ITV programme. The staff are friendly and keen, and the service swift and efficient, making punters feel welcome and special.

The menu is for treats and occasions.   The famed Laverstoke buffalo burgers are local, while torched Cornish mackerel and off-shore mussels, East Coast brown shrimp and Norfolk free-range chicken presumably come from further away.  Both times I have been at lunch-time my companion (as professional restaurant critics say) has had the crab sandwich and I have had the enormous cheesy Croque Monsieur with lashings of salad.

The only awkward note is struck by the parking, which is fairly restricted and accessed round an awkward corner, so share lifts and come in as small a car as you can manage!

Prozac or prayers?

There is nothing worse when you're depressed than being told to pull yourself together. The illness is all consuming, the black dog, a thick blanket smothering everything, even joy. And it can descend when you're 'supposed' to be happy, like when you've had a new baby, or your life looks rosy every other way.
  Since joining Twitter I've had snippet conversations with interesting, inspiring people who really do have reasons to be down, but are intent on helping others. My story is no way as deep as some, but I still have one and have sympathy with others who have it and are afraid to admit it.
   I think I was prone to depression or at least melancholy even as a child. I can remember the mournful thoughts from earliest memories. I was third of four children, picked on and teased because I was skinny and serious. While my sisters got into trouble of various sorts, I kept my head down, studied, achieved, was head girl, got into Oxford, sang soprano - but somehow it was never quite enough for the family. Or so it seemed.
   I remember some moments  in my first year at Oxford when I sat in my lovely room in Turl Street, listening to voices and footsteps rollicking past, and hiding from the knock on the door. Why? Low grade depression. Pressure of being surrounded by brilliant people. Nearly dropped out, but didn't, and bizarrely, in my third year when I had finals and was dumped by a longterm boyfriend, I was really happy. Why? Because a gorgeous first year made me feel beautiful again. That sounds shallow, but it worked.
  More seriously I became v depressed as a single mum. The usual symptoms (though I didn't know it) of waking early with thumping heart and feeling of dread. My little boy came in wearing his school uniform and said, 'Mummy can you do up my top button?' I stared at him. Couldn't even do his button for him. Realised I needed help, for his sake, as well as mine. Took him to school and went straight to my GP who realised I knew what I was talking about, and prescribed Prozac.
   Some say you can be addicted, but I was only on it for a year. But in that year the sun came out. I likened it to being a boat being pushed gently off the shore into the ocean, calm seas, not storms. I made plans. Sold my house, moved my boy and back to London (see previous blog - it didn't pan out as I planned, but at least I had planned), got in touch with his father and saw them grow close. So much more.
   What I'm saying is recognise it. Tackle it head on, before someone close to you suffers. And don't dismiss medication. It's not for everyone, and some react badly. Don't come off it without guidance. But when it works, boy, for some of us

 it really is the answer.

 

Stabbing the Rain

This is the cover of my collection of short stories. Available on Amazon in e-book and print. Enjoy!

Single Mum to Host Mum

This is random in the sense that it's not chronological, but although I want to pursue those earlier memories of single parenthood, I've been deflected to write a little about how to beat this wretched recession by having lodgers. In our case foreign language students.
   The little boy who I dragged to London aged seven was now 19 and off to do an art foundation course. We needed money to pay for his fees and accommodation and brutal as it sounds we now had a double room going begging. We could put his two little brothers in together to release the little back bedroom and take in lodgers! Now this scheme is anathema to most people who wouldn't dream of sharing their house with a stranger. But needs must when the devil drives and it's actually as easy as pie. I had done it before, when as a single mother I did it, when G was little, in my wee house in Andover. I had two lodgers, swiftly but carefully vetted by me, always male, and it was fantastic. They helped with the mortgage, put up shelves and bunkbeds, even babysat sometimes, and buggered off back to their own families at weekends.
Not so foreign students, who can stay for up to six months and need food and conversation. it's not a job for the chronically anti-social or those who are married to a chronic anti-social. Most wives could do it, very few husbands, but mine is great and I've often left him having a convoluted conversation about corporal punishment or the finer points of cricket with a pair of bemused Koreans. Or, just occasionally, a very handsome Spaniard..
 

Streets not paved with gold

My intro to Twitter has had me wandering up and down all sorts of highways and byways, in and out of people's life experiences, and in particular one today has struck me, about the challenges of being a single mother which takes me right back to the days when I was a single mother with an adorable little boy who didn't meet his father till he was seven. How that came to pass will wait another day, because it's one hell of a story.
This is about thinking that although he was born in Hampshire I felt my real home was London. So when he was nearly 7 we moved back there, back to the place where I had been footloose, fancy free, and indeed where I got pregnant in the first place. I assumed my lonely single life would magically change just by being in the big city. In Hampshire all my friends were married - although 20 years on they are all, without exception, divorced.
   My little fourth floor attic (87 steps) was in Earls Court. £80,000 odd in 1995. My God, last time I looked it was selling for £400,000 or so. Tiny, studio, two bedrooms carved out of it, a floor bowed in the middle, leaking roof whenever it rained. Worse leaks for the neighbours beneath whenever I used the washing machine. I  hoped it might become a kind of atelier love nest, perched as it was above the District Line, rattled as it was by the vibrations of the Piccadilly Line deep below the ground. And located as it was right in the middle of Earl's Court , then an affordable slice of South Kensington full of rangy South Africans, but probably now tarted up out of anyone who isn't an oligarch.
   But actually life as a single mother was not as I'd envisaged when I returned to the haunts of my carefree youth. Because it meant finding not only good local schools for my son G but also childminders to fetch him after school, as I was working full time. I cringe to remember two of those childminders, total strangers, one an Italian grandmother living in a weird kind of garlic-flavoured shrine off Redcliffe Gardens where you had to push through endless tinkling curtains to get to the hunched figure of your son doing his homework at a vast mahogany table large enough to lay out your grandmother. Another was the single mother of a vast child who lived at the top of a council block on North End Road, and that's where G got his first taste of computer games. Eventually I found a nursery called Pippa Poppins in Fulham Road which was a kind of oasis of trad calm and efficiency. Amongst other amazing services such as providing hotel accommodation soley geared towards kids, it picked up your child from school, took it back to the yellow painted house near Fulham Broadway, gave him tea and supervised his homework. A lifesaver until I got a job opposite our flat and was able to walk to the school to pick him up.
   If you're a single mother in London you can't just nip on impulse to the City to have champagne with your exceedingly rich, unmarried, childless mates from university, because you must first get a babysitter. You can't just mooch down the Kings Road shopping because you don't have any money. You can't bring a man back to the flat because he's likely to be accosted by a little ruffle haired boy waving toast at him and demanding, 'Are you going to marry my Mummy?'

 

Unusual jobs for boys

Is university the right or only answer? The debt is bad enough, but the job prospects after graduating are bleak, too. If your children aren't going to be lawyers or medics or academics, what is the point? I'm pretty sure my boys are intelligent but I'm not sure they have the bite and drive that will get them to the top of the class. Plus they have their own individual gifts which are still fledgling. Early days, I know. Who can say how they will have developed come year 9 when they have to make their choices? To date Ed hasn't thought about a career, though I'm sowing the seed of a paper round for starters. Or running a babysitting cartel. He could make a killing on a New Year's Eve..Dom wants to be a saxophonist, but resents the practice that that entails. I think he can start off busking in the town centre when he's old enough, and see what response he gets.
    As for the jobs I would like to see them doingas adults, well, I've raised eyebrows by saying it would be fun to have a hairdresser in the family, and definitely a chef. Whatever they do, it needs to be training while earning. Everyone mocked the McDonalds degree, but why? The hospitality trade seems to boom even as we are all cutting culinary corners at home (see later blog about feeding six people on half what a London couple I know lives on), so surely that is one area to explore? Hard graft, but restaurants bars or hotels seem to be the way forward in these hard times. The Hotel du Vin, my favourite chain, do training courses I believe.  Being a baker, or cheesemaker seems pretty cool.  Another idea is graphic interior design, if that were possible without the architectural/mathematical side of things. Designing people's interiors on the computer. Ed would like to have a Saturday job stacking shelves or working in a furniture emporium, so he can arrange the goods himself.  Taking words from the wise eldest son who is doing well as a graphic designer, Gabes reckons that everyone should be computer savvy and particularly in web design because everyone and every business needs a website now and that is not going to change.
   What about erotic writing, I hear you ask? Er, no. It's a hobby that barely pays, although watch this space for Primula's new offering later in the year..