Kings Arms and getting legless

So to lunch yesterday at the George at Burpham, which is a very pleasant experience, as the pub has been sensitively refurbished and is a comfortable venue for the most important meal of the day, but could be vastly enhanced by the provision of a decent menu. The food is always good, but the chef (if he is responsible for the menu choices) has the imagination of a stunned gnat. Suffice to say that three of the four intrepid members of the steering committee of the Arundel Luncheon Club found that battered hake with chips to be the best option. The chef can clearly cook, but will someone please give his some guidance? Nearly Hairless Nick, do you not have some influence?  Lamb, chicken, game, and something spicy would be a good start.

Over lunch with the beautiful Ali, mentor to the stars, and her husband Charlie Pistorius Malcolmson, whilst a hail storm of biblical proportions raged, as today’s picture bears witness, there was a wide-ranging discussion which covered many aspects of life including the benefits of having an account with Currencies Direct and getting legless, which one might think could be an inherent problem for a pub landlord. As his name suggests, he took this rather too literally and decided to have a motorbike accident in his younger days which involved him getting partially legless, hence his epithet of Pistorius in this column.

Hail storm turns everything white in Burpham

Recently, these wonderful chaps have suffered a fire at their brilliant pub in Arundel, The Kings Arms, and are currently battling insurance companies whilst they sleep in the bar,  This is, thankfully (and I am being entirely selfish here), undamaged, which is apparently the opposite to what one may witness upstairs. It is a testament to their fortitude that they were determined to open the pub the same afternoon following the blaze, which had involved five fire engines and gutted the upper floor. One can still see the holes in the ceiling which were drilled by the fire brigade to allow the water they were using to stop the inferno spreading to drain into rooms below, thereby protecting the said ceiling.

Insurance assessors and insurance companies in general are clearly nearly all delinquents with the kind of sympathetic qualities one might find at an abattoir. Twice they have arrived at the pub and given conflicting advice about how to deal with the damage, which means that after 10 days of dealing with the aftermath of what must have been a deeply shocking experience, Charlie and Ali are still unable to touch anything from upstairs whilst the assessors, err… assess.

It seems today that the insurance company are sending in their forensic experts to examine the seat of the blaze, presumably to confirm that Henry the Hoover, identified as the alleged culprit by the fire brigade, despite not having been used for 4 days (shame on you Ali) was to blame. That Nice Lady Decorator put it more succinctly than I, “Are they coming to arrest Henry the Hoover?”, she said as the second bottle of a rather cheeky Italian arrived. The moral of this tale is not to leave any electrical appliances plugged in, even if the power is switched off, which seems to have been the reason for this fire to start.

Perhaps the crusted port was pushing a things too far, and the bill, when it arrived, was rather shocking. The wine was my choice so I must shoulder much of the blame. I shall be more careful this evening when I must journey to Aylesbury, for the opening of the Friars exhibition at the Aylesbury Museum. It says much that a celebration of what a group of us thrusting young chaps managed to create in seventies in this formerly nice old market town should be recognised in a museum. There will be more details in tomorrow’s missive.

Chris France
@Valbonne_News