Scran

Pub culture in the UK is special. From the outside it might look like we're all raging alcoholics but pubs are special places. Or they were. They seem to be going the way of chains. Huge businesses than span the entire country in the name of "traditional pub fare", meaning more often than not pre-prepared and reheated on demand. Vague similes of the food we used to eat. Hearty pies and lumpy savoury mash. Sausages bursting at the seams practically doing a breast stroke in an olympic plate of gravy. These days it's the same. But not. Mealy mystery meat tubes in salty brown stuff. Stale pies that taste like margarine.

It's not hard to see why or how we got here. To be in business is to grow. To grow is to beat competition. To do that is to be cheap, consistent. Fuck consistency. The breweries own the pubs and the hospitality chains own it all.

Real local independent pubs are all but dead. Some linger in purgatory, transitioning to gentrified-flavoured gastro things, other stick to their guns and side-eye anyone who suggests different. The pub today was neither.

Dressed up as an independent family business (which may be true in the truest truth) but deep down a soulless corporate entity. Shame.

But that is nothing a bowl of handmade, homeboiled, selfconsumed pasta can't fix.

Look, I'm not saying this is normal... or that it even makes sense. However, I am a firm believer that anything is breakfast food if you snaffle it in within the usual breakfast window. I believe it is Ronald McDonald that decides when we breakfast and when we burger.

Honestly though, a ploughmans breakfast? Sign me the fuck up. A slice of toast, slathered in pickle and topped with the salty creamy good time cheddar boy.

There is a joy to crumbling a shoulder of cheese onto a knuckle of bread. Rustic and hobbitly. The pickle, well, who doesn't like pickle.

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Lunch was an uninspired bog standard and unfancy fish finger sandwich and club sandwich. Shared, so we get half each innit.

Luckily this pub hasn't gone the way of the sourdough and just used some relatively fresh sliced little numbers to encase the "meh" fillings. As welcome as that was, it still wasn't great. Neither was my stomach for a few days afterwards., Perhaps it was the toasted brown bread that smelled exactly like your index and middle finger about 90 minutes after 2 cigarettes.

Now we're talking. Taking an honest to god pasta wrangler to an airbnb is a revelation. Praise be the Enterprise gods for their cheap car upgrade.

One might consider visiting local farms for local produce to piece together something of the land. But it seems the South Downs have gone the way of the boug. Fancy airbnb's have replaced a lot of the farms (including this one) and the rest are either "farm style" farm shops or flat out don't cater to randoms from London. Alas, it was Tesco that sorted the ingredients for a simple crab, lemon and chilli linguine.