Just some reheated cheese/spinach pie this evening but yesterday he had our main meal at lunchtime in Wood's, which is Dulverton's premier dining establishment.
The food was pretty good. We both had a starter of smoked salmon, smoked eel, quail's egg and caviar for starters - you're not meant to eat caviar while pregnant, so I got Anna's portion as well. She had fillets of John Dory with small shrimps, salad and new potatoes for the main, while I did pretty well with a big mound of mussels in a sort of Chinese-y sauce of ginger, black bean and sweet red peppers, with proper needle-thin frites on the side. Finally, chocolate pudding for her, lemon posset for me. Cheddar Valley cider and cava to drink. All in all, very tasty, but what made it an experience was the venue. I kind of wish luka could have been there to see it - he'd have had a field day. It's loosely a 'pub', with a bar area with stools and another section with small tables for dining; the building, I would imagine, is probably a couple of hundred years old, although it's hard to tell in villages like this, where I think rough-finished stone continued to be used a long time after brick became the default material in towns and cities.
As is the case with many businesses around here, the visual theme is Exmoor itself, which is represented first and foremost by the stag. (There's a second-hand bookshop here with whole sections, covering several shelves each, on fishing, hunting, dogs, guns, gun-dogs and dog-guns.) The interior of the restaurant is a sort of temple to animal cruelty; quite apart from the stuffed heads of stags, badgers and foxes, paintings of racehorses and stuffed fish on the wall, there are parts of skulls with antlers projecting from them, as well as all the pieces of hardware associated with the lifestyle: fishing rods, riding crops, whips and spurs, and what I'm fairly sure were a couple of gin traps. The only thing missing was guns, really.
But the best exhibit of all was one of our fellow diners. Clearly a regular, this old chap of about 80 was in there by himself for Saturday lunch. His hair and eyebrows were Hesselteinian, his shirt was Daz Ultra white; plum-purple velvet jacket, bright red trousers, shiny brown leather shoes, and a polychromatic (but I think mainly indigo) paisley tie, the lower half of which was tucked into his shirt, presumably to keep it out of soup range. As he left, I saw him don a bright yellow hat (either a homburg or a fedora, I think) with a green band around it.
You could tell by looking at him that he'd probably have been quite interesting to talk to, but would also have considered Oswald Mosley a bit of a wet softy liberal woofter.