In fact, the less often I have to go to the big smoke, the better.
I far prefer heading for the hills, and believe me, unless you do that you forget that despite the iffy weather, England is a really beautiful country.
Last weekend was a Bank Holiday, and sick to death of management complaining she hadn’t had a real vacation this summer, we booked a couple of days in a Devon village called Rockford that I had never heard of before.
Management had found the place by fluke. She googled fly-fishing hotels, and somehow this 17th Century Inn in the Exmoor forests cropped up.
It’s not really a hotel as it only has seven rooms and it doesn’t own any riverside as ‘proper’ angling resorts do.
But most important, it was the only one in our price range and across the road from a National Park river with wild brown trout as residents. It does have annual spawning migrations of seatrout and salmon, but for me the real prize was the feral brownies.
The river is in the heart of unspoilt woodland, so the water is peat-filtered and tumbles along fast-running boulder-strewn rapids and deep pools in a muscular dash to the Atlantic. I was in piscatorial paradise.
There’s not much to do in Rockford except walk in the woods, have leisurely pub meals and fish, which is fine by me.
Management was game for two out of three, so after a bracing walks along oak and birch lined trails and a steak-and-ale pie at a riverside pub, I sent her back to read in the cosy Inn while I waved a five-weight graphite stick in the hope of hooking some of the wiliest fish around.
Everything, but everything, is so far removed from the big smoke that you could be on a different planet. Just little things tell massive stories.
For example, the outdoor shops here sell knives – as do most fishing and hiking shops in the world. A knife is an essential outdoor tool and I never go hiking without one in case I want to whittle a stick or prise open an interesting looking piece of fungus.
Homicidal maniacs
But in London, most people think a knife turns lovely people into homicidal maniacs. You get arrested for having one.
On the second day we came across a pub called the Stag Hunter. Again, in London that would be heresy – I mean, the urban luvvies would consider that to be a personal affront to Bambi and insist said pub be demolished (or at least renamed). The fact that the pub is 500 years old and its first customers were probably subsistence stag hunters means nothing to the metropolitan elite.
To cock a snook at the luvvies, we stopped for lunch at the Stag Hunter and the barman asked what accent I had.
The fact that he asked, when most of the country not only knows what a South African accent is but even do mangled impersonations, shows how far off the tourist track Rockford is.
When I told him he said with a huge smile, ‘I hope you support the English cricket team.’
For me this was a first; to the metro Brits, patriotism is so politically incorrect that you would never presume to ask whether anyone supported the country they have lived in for the past 15 years. Not so in backwoods Devon – they’re proudly Bulldog and refreshingly devoid of the ‘imperialistic’ angst of the chattering classes.
The three days passed far too quickly and as we hit the M5 back to London, management reverted to her current default moan that she hadn’t had a real summer holiday, whereas I had selfishly gone to Chicago and New Orleans in May. The fact that it was a frenetic business trip is beside the point.
But I’m bracing myself for more whining. By the time you read this I will be in New York on another … er, business trip.
More of that later – if I survive management’s wrath, that is.
