Friends

Saturday has been a day to spend with friends. We headed up across Harting Down, through South Harting, Petersfield, Selbourne, and Alton, en route to see Betty and Barney Rubble in Odiham. It was a nice drive on a blustery, but sunny day.

As we came through Selbourne the Gorse Fox and Silver Vixen were amused by the presence of a chap standing in the road holding traffic while squad of army cadet crossed the road. Why amused? Well every member of the squad wore high visibility jackets - with the exception of the chap standing in the road holding the traffic. Then to add a degree of irony we realised that the cadets were wearing high visibility jackets over their camouflage gear - which rendered it somewhat redundant.

We carried on to Alton only to find significant redevelopment taking place and roads that we had planned to use were closed. We followed the diversion but even then found ourselves emerging at a further huge development.

We arrived at Betty and Barney's and settled down for a coffee and chat, catching up with all the family news. It's always nice to catch up with old friends. At lunch time we leapt into their Prius and whined out of Odiham towards Church Crookham. We had a table booked at The Exchequer. Nuzzling the car in past the Bentleys and other luxury motors we made our way into the pub and found our table.

They were very busy but it did give us time to study the menu. We started with a sharing platter of seafood. This was absolutely delicious, thought the Silver Vixen found the crab a little strong.

We then went on to our main dishes. Both the Silver Vixen and the Gorse Fox had some battered haddock which was beautifully crispy and thoroughly enjoyable.

The pub was very nice but being busy was extremely noisy. It didn't help that the table of four who settled next to us seemed to be amateur town criers or maybe trainee foghorns. As nice as the food was, it was actually a relief to get outside into the peace and quiet when we had finished.

We went back to Odiham and settled back in for an afternoon of tea, cake, and chat.

It was just getting dark as we said our goodbyes and left. We took a slightly different route home. The Gorse Fox couldn't be bothered with the cross-country stretch from Petersfield to Chichester, so we stuck on the A3 and grabbed the A27. Longer maybe, but much quicker.