Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [124]
Tuesday, December 3rd, Brace of Pheasant lnn, Plush, Dorset
I left for Dorset at 12.30 after booking a room in an out-of-the-way sixteenth century thatched inn (thank you, Good Food Guide) at Plush, a village fourteen or so miles north of Dorchester in what looked good Hardy and walking country.
My much needed spell of’time off’ had acquired a certain significance and I left unhappily. Helen upset because of the baby being due in a month or so and my going away – even tho’ I know she wanted me to go. If I’d just taken off that morning it would have seemed all far less calculated.
It was a grizzly grey day as the train rattled over Egdon Heath. My first impression of Dorchester was of seeing schoolboys out of the corner of my eye, nudging each other and pointing at me. One followed me back from the station. So much for getting away from Monty Python. But as soon as I left Dorchester in a cab for Plush, I felt very Sherlock Holmes-ish – the night was dark, I could dimly see the outlines of hills on either side, the road wound crazily and suddenly the taxi had stopped. ‘Right, this is it, sir.’ Oh, yes, there was a whitewashed thatched house outside, but that was about all. The cab turned and sped off into the dark.
A snug little inn – my room is tiny and I share it with a huge chimney-breast. The pub is well unimproved. A low beamed ceiling and a single bar/dining room which makes for a cheerful communal spirit. An open fire, a landlord with a rather jolly, but loud voice, just returned from a holiday in Tenerife, where he had taken his wife to recuperate from a stroke. She was in hospital at the moment having her kneecaps removed (I couldn’t work out whether this was in some way related to the holiday or not).
A rather frail, but florid-faced chap with a fine check sports coat, cavalry twills and a military moustache, came in from the night.
‘Hello, Colonel,’ says the barman.
‘I could ring Roy Mason’s bloody neck,’ says the Colonel ruefully, tho’ not violently, as he eases himself onto the bar stool. (Roy Mason had just announced some almost universally applauded and long delayed-cuts in our defence budget.)
That was rather the tone of the evening. A characteristic I noticed from my vantage point by the fire (where I sat with a large whisky and ice, trying to read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) is that these country chaps talk only of facts – the size of an aeroplane, the hours of sunshine, the number of pigs so and so has – never feelings, nor impressions and certainly not emotions.
Wednesday, December 4th, Plush
Today I have walked nearly twenty miles over the hills and across the muddy fields of Dorset, I feel deliciously tired, I have had a long soak in a hot bath and in half an hour or so I will don my brown velvet jacket and elegantly clump downstairs for a drink, a read perhaps around the open fire, and then a meal which I know will be excellently cooked, and a bottle of rather expensive wine.
But it’s all such a lovely illusion. I know that the maître d’hôtel will greet me with a booming voice when I get downstairs – and there’ll be absolutely no chance of me slipping unobtrusively into a seat until everyone in the bar knows where I’ve been and what I’m drinking. I shall then try to read and yet find it impossible in the confined space of the bar to avoid hearing the rich country voices of the customers airing their rich country views.
Though there have been wonderful things down here – the food and the stunning sunny weather today and striding along the chalk ridges with the sun lighting the valleys – I am looking forward to being in that train pulling into