Certainly I had never seen this kind of tempo outside a restaurant in London. Waiters and waitresses dashed everywhere trying to fulfil what appeared to be an inexhaustible demand to keep the customers fed and, above all, supplied with wine. It was quite extraordinary. As I stood there, trying to maintain my bearings, Keith Floyd, the food johnny, wobbled past. I was impressed.
It all rather went to my head. I'm not usually much of one for lunch, but the food smelled so wonderful and the ambience was so extraordinary that I found myself ordering like a trencherman. I had a starter of scallop and lobster terrine, an exquisite fillet of sea bass with green beans and a mountain of chips, two glasses of wine, and rounded it off with coffee and a generous slab of cheesecake. The proprietor, a jolly nice man named Arthur Watson, wandered among the tables and even called on me. He told me that until ten years before the place had once been just a normal cafe doing roast lunches and burger and chips, and little by little they had begun introducing fresh fish and fancier foods and found there was a clamour for it. Now it was packed out every mealtime and had just been named the Good Food Guide's restaurant of the year for Dorset, but they still did burgers and they still did chips with everything, and I thought that was just wonderful.
It was gone three when I emerged from the Riverside with a light head and heavy everything else. Taking a seat on a bench, I pulled out my map and realized with a snort of dismay that I was still ten miles from Lyme Regis, with the 626 feet of Golden Cap, the highest hill on the south coast, standing between me and it. My blisters throbbed, my legs ached, my stomach was grotesquely distended and a light rain was beginning to fall.
As I sat there, a bus pulled up. I got up and put my head in the open door. 'Going west?' I said to the driver. He nodded. Impulsively, I lumbered aboard, bought a ticket and took a seat towards the back. The trick of successful walking, I always say, is knowing when to stop.
CHAPTER TEN
I SPENT THE NIGHT IN LYME REGIS AND PASSED THE FOLLOWING morning poking about in the town before catching a bus to Axminster and a train on to Exeter, a process that consumed considerably more time than I had expected. Daylight was fading by the time I stepped from Exeter St David's into a light but annoying rain.
I wandered through the city examining hotels from the street, but they all seemed a bit grand for me, and eventually ended up at the central tourist office, feeling mildly lost and far from home. I wasn't quite sure what I was doing here. I looked through racks of leaflets for shirehorse centres, petting zoos, falconry centres, miniature pony centres, model railways, butterfly farms, and something called I jest not Twiggy Winkie's Farm and Hedgehog Hospital, none of which seemed to address my leisure requirements. Nearly all the leaflets were depressingly illiterate, particularly with regard to punctuation 1 sometimes think that if I see one more tourist leaflet that says 'Englands Best' or 'Britains Largest' I will go and torch the place and they all seemed so pathetically modest in what they had to offer. Nearly all of them padded out their lists of featured attractions with things like 'Free Car Park', 'Gift Shop and TeaRoom' and the inevitable 'Adventure Playground' (and then were witless enough to show you in the photograph that it was just a climbingframe and a couple of plastic animals on springs). Who goes to these places? I couldn't say, I'm sure.
There was a notice on the counter saying that the office booked rooms, so I asked the helpful lady if she would secure me lodgings.
She interviewed me candidly with regard to how much I was prepared to pay, which I always find embarrassing and frankly unEnglish, and by a process of attrition we established that I fell into a category that could be called cheap but demanding. It happened that the Royal Clarence was doing a special deal with rooms at .25 a night if you promised not to steal the towels, and I leapt at that because I'd passed it on the way in and it looked awfully nice, a big white Georgian place on the cathedral square. And so it proved to be. The room was newly decorated and big enough for hotelroom Olympics wastebin basketball, furniture steeplechase, jumping on to the bed by means of a swing on the bathroom door and a welltimed leap, and other perennial favourites of the lone traveller. I had a short but vigorous workout, showered, changed and hit the streets famished.
Exeter is not an easy place to love. It was extensively bombed during the war, which gave the city fathers a wonderful opportunity, enthusiastically seized, to rebuild most of it in concrete. It was only a little after six in the evening, but the city centre was practically dead. I wandered around beneath gloomy street lights, looking in shop windows and reading those strange posters bills, as they are known in the trade that you always find for provincial newspapers. I have an odd fascination with these because they are always either wholly unfathomable to nonlocals ('Letter Box Rapist Strikes Again', 'Beulah Flies Home') or so boring that you can't imagine how anyone could possibly have thought they would boost sales ('Council Storm Over Bins Contract', 'Phone Box Vandals Strike Again'). My favourite this is a real one, which I saw many years ago in Hemel Hempstead was 'Woman, 81, Dies'.
Perhaps I took all the wrong streets, but there seemed to be no restaurants anywhere in central Exeter. I was only looking for something modest that didn't have 'Fayre', 'Vegan' or 'Copper Kettle' in the title, but all that happened was I kept wandering down restaurantless streets and coming up against monstrous relief roads with massive roundabouts and complicated pedestrian crossings that clearly weren't designed to be negotiated on foot by anyone with less than six hours to spare. Finally, I happened on a hilly street with a few modest eateries and plunged randomly into a Chinese restaurant. I can't say why exactly, but Chinese restaurants make me oddly uneasy, particularly when I am dining alone. I always feel that the waitress is saying: 'One beef satay and fried rice for the imperialist dog at table five.' And I find chopsticksfrankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years, haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food? I spent a perplexed hour stabbing at rice, dribbling sauce across the tablecloth and lifting finely poised pieces of meat to my mouth only to discover that they had mysteriously vanished and weren't to be found anywhere. By the time I finished, the table looked as if it had been at the centre of a violent argument. I paid my bill in shame and slunk out the door and back to the hotel where I watched a little TV and snacked on the copious leftovers that I found in sweater folds and trouser turnups.
In the morning, I rose early and went out for a look round the town. Exeter was locked in a foggy gloom that didn't do anything for its appearance, though the cathedral square was very handsome and the cathedral, I was impressed to find, was open even at eight in the morning. I sat for some time at the back and listened to the morning choir practice, which was quite wonderful. Then I wandered down to the old quay area to see what I might find there. It had been artily renovated with shops and museums, but all of them were closed at this time of day or perhaps this time of year and there wasn't a soul about.
By the time I returned to the High Street, the shops were opening. I hadn't had breakfast because it wasn't included in my special room rate, so I was feeling immoderately peckish and began a hunt for cafes, but again Exeter seemed strangely lacking. In the end, I went into Marks & Spencer to buy a sandwich.