I took a journey into my past during the recent Bank Holiday, with visits to places much frequented in my youth — Cambridge, Stamford and Melton Mowbray. In the case of the last, I had hoped to stock up there with foodstuffs associated with it as gifts for those at home. Strangely, neither Stilton cheese nor a Melton Mowbray pork pie was purchasable at 5pm on a Sunday. This struck me as a missed marketing opportunity, as indeed was the failure to supply anything for visitors concerning the sport for which the town was once best known. A blue plaque, on a house opposite the station, stating that this was the in-season home of Lord Cardigan — he of Charge of the Light Brigade fame — was the only clue that Melton had been the national centre for foxhunting.

Our interest in food was the main motive for the trip. In the four years since our local, The Waterman’s Arms in Osney, became The Punter, we had been wanting to eat at the Cambridge pub of the same name and under the same ownership. Somehow we never got round to it. Then our friend and neighbour Paul Bennett, having hired a car to drive to a family Sunday lunch in Loughborough, proposed we join him on the journey east, with Saturday night spent in Oxford’s rival on the Cam. We jumped at the chance, with added enthusiasm when The Punter’s co-owner Tom Rainey booked us a table there, with instructions that we were to be given a free bottle of champagne.

The Saturday morning drive was punctuated by a bar lunch at the Old Bridge Hotel in Huntington. This was a haunt of mine in the days when I covered the local Crown Court. How long ago can be gauged from the fact that its young barrister ‘star’ was Igor Judge, later the Lord Chief Justice. We are talking, in fact, of 1970, a year into the hotel’s ownership by Martin Hoskins. His son, John Hoskins, is now in charge and, being a Master of Wine, operates a wine shop on the premises. I fell into conversation with him on the way out (having stopped to admire the wallpaper) and was able to tell him that on my first visit to the hotel in 40 years, I thought it looked better than ever.

The 24 hours spent in Cambridge proved to be one pub after the other, which will not surprise those who know me. Having settled into our room at The Carpenter’s Arms, an attractive gastro pub fashioned from a backstreet local in Victoria Road, we spent the afternoon slumbering (while Paul saw sights), rising to begin the evening at The Eagle, in Benet Street. This wonderful old pub is famous as the place where Francis Crick interrupted lunchtime conversation on February 28, 1953, to announce that he and James Watson had discovered “the secret of life”, their proposal for the structure of DNA.

Oxford Mail:
Chris Gray at The Carpenter's Arms, Cambridge

My own memories concern merry sessions before and after reviewing duties at the Arts Theatre. Plays I appraised included Iris Murdoch’s The Three Arrows, starring Ian McKellen as an American Indian called Prince Yoremitsu. Very rum.

From The Eagle we walked to the riverside pleasures of The Mill and, close by, The Anchor. Having lingered longer than we intended at the second, we took a cab to The Punter (though its premises in Pound Hill are hardly very far).

Not surprisingly, this turned out to be very much like the Oxford Punter, though slightly larger, with the same eclectic assortment of pictures and furnishings, and candle-lit throughout. Fizz was served by manager Sarah, and soon after we were tucking into a delicious dinner — potted shrimps in my case, followed by plaice.

I shall now fast-forward from this merry evening to the next day, for I wish to devote space to describing what we did in Stamford. Our first stop was at The George Hotel, a famous former coaching inn on what was once the Great North Road. The portrait of fat man Daniel Lambert (who died in Stamford in 1809, weighing 52st 11lb) still hangs near the front door. These days, he does not look as grotesquely overweight as he once did; I suppose we have become accustomed to much worse.

Our call was made in order to inquire about lunch for later. In fact, we did not return, having become enthralled by an event on the town meadows. This was the 11th Stamford Car Show, organised by the local Round Table. What a feast of nostalgia it supplied!

Some of the 500-plus cars on view were very old indeed, including a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost with a notice revealing that it cost £3,000 when new in 1910 and was now worth “quite a lot”. But most were of the sort familiar in Rosemarie’s and my youth in the 1960s, including some of the models we had owned.

A Triumph Vitesse convertible in the same maroon as one she drove stood, by coincidence, right beside an olive green Ford Anglia identical to my first car. Rosemarie’s ‘first’, a Singer Gazelle, could also be seen, as well as her family Morris Eight (see her with it above) and her grandad’s Standard Vanguard.

From a vantage point supplied by the terrace of town’s new JD Wetherspoon pub, named for the local newspaper, The Stamford Post, we had the excitement of watching the cars in action as they made their way home from the show site.

And then, from the same spot, we viewed a fly-past by two Avro Lancaster Bombers — the world’s last survivors of this famous breed. This was a true moment of magic for which was supplied by many of the pub’s patrons the suitable vocal accompaniment of Eric Coates’s The Dam Busters March.