Adventures on the High Teas: In Search of Middle England
Stuart Maconie
Language: English
Pages: 346
ISBN: 0091926513
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
a little apologetic. The town's websites and literature mention the fact that Margaret Thatcher, longest-serving prime minister of the twentieth century, was born here, but could hardly be said to shout it from the rooftops. They make much more of another local lad, Isaac Newton, in that there's a big, ugly shopping centre bearing his name and a statue in the town square. Maybe this is understandable, as even the most passionate and confirmed Thatcherite would concede that the three laws of
returning home to their wives, claiming shiftily they had a pot of tuna salad for lunch. If you are going to eat pork pies, then, they should be Melton Mowbray pork pies, on the grounds that forbidden pleasures should be of the finest quality. When speaking of the town rather than the pies, call it Melton. This will make you sound like a local. If you want to, of course. I learn this from a woman at the station taxi rank, information she manages to impart between her lung-sapping drags on
Ludlow's intricate maze of little streets is crammed with vans bringing delicious quirky things to be arranged alluringly in the windows of one of a hundred small shops. Tucked away though it may be, Ludlow has always had stuff on its plate in every sense of the phrase. It's been said that more has been written about Ludlow's history than any other English town. Ludlow has history like Burton has yeast. If you could make a tasty spread out of excess and leftover history, Ludlow could have a
in the town. They've always made real things here: wool and tweed at the nearby Bliss Mill rather than cream teas and souvenir doilies. The Crown and Cushion Hotel was once owned by Keith Moon, the 'hilarious' wild man drummer of The Who, much given to dressing as a Nazi and driving cars into swimming pools. Moon's influence, it is fair to say, does not pervade the old coaching inn today. The boy who greets us is painfully shy and diffident, blond and softly spoken, like the slow, childlike
beyond Denham golf club and Gerrards Cross to Beaconsfield, the 'clearing in the beeches'. There are Beaconsfields in Iowa and Nova Scotia, in Sydney and Melbourne, Perth and Queensland, and Beaconsfield Tasmania was once the richest gold town on that far-away island. But this is the very English Beaconsfield: prosperous, pleasant and frequently murderous, at least on telly. The high street is replete with the staples of Middle England: a Waitrose, a Lloyd's chemist and a Help the Aged with