I was wandering with a friend the other day through the bracken on Black Down, somewhere east of Weston-super-Mare, musing on the general degradation of the male experience. He felt the thermostat to be illustrative of the tawdriness of our modern lives: writ large, this little device is the sublimation of our primordial instincts, an invention pulling us ever further away from the skin-tingling shock of real existence.
There are the stones. They’d look majestic, if it weren’t for the sodding January tupperware sky. And with a better photographer.
To wit: back in the day, when we had manes rather than mullets and the meat was always flame-grilled, we would light a fire in our cave when the sun lay low, forbearing the smoke to enjoy this hard-earned flush of warmth. It was the man’s job to provide the food and the man’s job to chop the logs for the fire. This was his territory, and all sides were grateful for it. These days, though, modern convenience has removed such certitude from our lives. The former symbiotic division of labour has been transformed into a niggling battle for supremacy, as the key skills of our modern (cave)man – the supply of food and heat – have now been divided amongst family members who, he feels somewhere deep in his gut, lack the innate ability to keep the homestead temperate in an efficient manner. So it is that he is reduced to turning down the thermostat when getting in from work, all the while giving his partner a pointed glare, with possibly a mutter about who pays the bills round here.
Mmmm geegaws.
The conversation then moved onto barbeques. This, as you can imagine, followed the same vein: we marked the milestones along the way, counting our descent from atavistic, Thesean warriors into today’s asinine, pathetic chefs-for-a-day.
Which is what leads me to this pub. Duloe, a small village in south Cornwall, is home to a stone circle of origins unknown. However, what we can guess is that the process of hewing the quartz from the earth and dragging each stone into its position must have taken a level of perseverance that few amongst us will ever put ourselves through. And here they stand, timeless monuments to a prehistoric faith, hidden away in a sheep field, but nonetheless, imposing and eerie spectacles of our past.
The close vicinity to which Ye Olde Plough celebrates with – wahey! – sizzling hot stone platters! We can gorge ourselves on stringy beef and chicken, slathered in vat-slopped cheese sauce, surrounded by the tacky ephemera of yer classic countryside pub, while eating off, y’know – stones. Like they did in the olden days. Sort of. And hey, it might shut the kids up for a bit – and you can have a sneaky pint of lager to take the edge off things, before heading off to your holiday cottage.
*sigh*
Ye Olde Plough House Inn
- Duloe
- Liskeard
- Cornwall PL14 4PN