Cricketers

A couple of weeks ago we had the door & window people of reference 1 in to attend to our kitchen. They did a quick, neat job and were done in just over half a day, but that did mean that catering arrangements were disturbed, so rather than sink to food delivery, we thought we would walk down to the pond to give the Cricketers a go, a place which we have not eaten at for a while - although FIL used to be rather keen, being an older gentleman, on their red barbecue sauce, containing as it did, plenty of sugar.

So around 17:30 down to the pond in the gathering dusk, to catch, as it happens, a glimpse of ratty. We also found that the viewpoint onto the pond was still blocked with alder and such, despite having mentioned the matter to the ecovols what must be years ago now. But a bit further along, we found that they had found the time to chop a few trees down, suggesting that 'eco' is really a euphemism for playing with chain saws. In these pages, sometimes the chain saw bandits, sometimes the chain saw volunteers. See, for example, reference 2.

And on into the Cricketers, bright, cheerful and pretty busy, considering that it was a Monday.

Interesting take on bread and olives to start. Which we were a bit disappointed with when it arrived, but ate rather better than we had at first expected. The dried tomatoes made a pleasant change.

I thought steak and chips would be safe enough, done the well done side of medium. Not dry, but not dripping either. And so it proved to be. BH was more adventurous, going for the mussels, which turned out to be rather small, from Connemara (on the west coast of Ireland), but quite acceptable. White sauce a little on the thin side. White bread from a factory.

Entirely satisfactory. It did what it said on the tin.

PS 1: after various vicissitudes, since being a simple public house, this one has now fallen into the clutches of Stonegate. See references 3, 4, 5 and 6 below. 

PS 2: a rare glitch in the Blogger software on the Windows 11 laptop. Something very wrong with the load insert image part of the template I use the second time around, having been OK the first time around, earlier in the day. Still very wrong the following morning (Wednesday), so moved downstairs to the Windows 10 machine where the new load image dialog box worked.

PS 3: in parallel, images were failing to load at reference 7, a failure I put down to the relevant cloud servers being busy. Loading OK this morning. But still no further progress with the green witch.

References

Reference 1: https://www.wrightglazing.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=chain+saw.

Reference 3: https://www.pubanddining.co.uk/cricketers-inn-epsom. Part of the Stonegate family.

Reference 4: https://www.stonegategroup.co.uk/. Part of the TDR family.

Reference 5: https://www.tdrcapital.com/. Which I thought was a vehicle owned by the Issa bothers, but it looks as if I have got that wrong. They are all mixed up together, but distinct. But not so distinct that Deloitte did not walk away from auditing the petrol station chunk of the empire.

Reference 6: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/11/wheatsheaf.html. First notice of TDR.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/common-sense.html.

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