poetry on a plate

The Pear Tree Inn in the sprawling Wiltshire village of Whitley is unobstrusive from the outside but inside it buzzes with good humoured babble and the sound of someone invisible kneading and slapping the dough making steak and kidney pies. An eyepatch-wearing Harley-Davidson motorcycle rider informed me--like the proprietor of THE WORLD periodical informed Dr Johnson that Lord Chesterfield claimed he had aided Johnson in compiling THE DICTIONARY--that the site of the present Inn was originally a farmhouse going back to over 3 hundred years ago, and this was evidenced by the bits of slightly hackneyed farming memrobilia such as cartwheels, penny farthing pitchforks and old rust-stricken scythes scattered here and there in the spacious garden. I decamped to that outrageously pretty garden with its chunky wooden benches, I--literally not fuguratively--touched the timber of the bench, closed my eyes and with--one cannot help resorting to quote Hamlet--my mind's eyes and imagined--it was a sort of literary masturbation--as does Gray in CHURCHYARD ELEGY imagines Cromwell to be buried in the cemetry--that Fielding, Goldsmith, Sterne, Coleridge might have sat on that bench. I liked the lofty barn-like restaurant for its pulling in punters from the outer reaches of the railway which Dickens abhorred and the motorway that Dylan Thomas loathed. I loved the food which was hearty, and the meal I ordered consisted of pan fried fish on a bed of rice with thick rich juicy dash of gravy. In both sight and taste, that lunch was poetry on a plate