East Cowton (or not)

East Cowton to Acorn Corner
When we arrived in East Cowton and began looking for Acorn Corner B&B. We soon realised that with no road name or house number, the address of "Markstone House" was going to be a little bit too vague to be useful. It's not a huge village, it has a post office (which had closed for the day) and a couple of streets of houses.

We asked a girl pushing a buggy, but she had no idea.

Martin asked a woman washing her car, but after listening to her talk for a full ten miuntes, waving her arms about as she told us to try turning "left, then right, no, second left, no straight on..." we realised that she didn't have a clue either.

Everybody was trying hard to be helpful, but nobody actually knew where Markstone House was. Eventually we laid the bikes down on a grassy verge outside a large house and Martin called laterooms.com for directions, while I tried to hunt it down on google maps. Neither was very helpful, and we were starting to wonder if we'd be sharing my orange emergency bivvy for the night when a lady came out of the house. We told her our predicament and she disappeared inside to fetch her son.

We then tried to get hold of Tiny to see if she and the computer could get a working phone number for Acorn Corner. Given our recent experiences of Yorkshire helpfulness, we weren't convinced the son would be much help, but instead of coming out to give us directions he appeared wearing cycling shoes and a helmet. "I'll just go down the store and get my bike."

George Robinson led us almost three miles out of the village on his road bike to take us to Markstone house. Of course we got talking. He was 17, and not content with just cycling, George does triathlon. In my book, anybody who even completes a triathlon is super-fit, but George apparently isn't content with just completing them. He wins them. I did some googling when I got back, and he's definitely one of the fastest in the region for his age group. Most people we talked to were pretty impressed that we were riding across England in five days. George did it last year in six. Except he started in nearby Northallerton, rode to the Robin Hood's Bay, cycled to the West coast and then back home. Yup, that's twice.

He left us at Acorn Corner and the owner, Dianne, led us in and showed us our twin room and the stone byre where we could store our bikes. Absolute luxury after two nights in hostels. The power shower got well used and the TV got turned on (Top Gear on Dave, of course) Proper clean fresh towels included in the price, and excellent beds. Dianne directed us to the Arden Arms where we could go to get food. She did offer to make us something herself, but we thought that'd be a bit unfair since we'd given her no warning.

The Arden Arms turned out to be a fair old ride from the B&B. We thought we must have missed a turnoff, but we hadn't and we got there eventually.

When King Chulalongkorn of Siam visited germany in 1907 his hosts commissioned an artist to paint an elephant so he would feel at home. The picture had all the features of an elephant - a long trunk, thick legs, big ears etc. - but it was obvious that the artist was drawing the beast, not from his own experience, but from descriptions that he'd heard. the 'elephant' looked more like a grey cow.

That surreal elephant picture sprang into my head as we ate. Minestrone soup with no pasta. hard boiled eggs in the curry. Mango chutney without popadoms. It felt like the chef had heard descriptions of exotic meals and tried to recreate them, but having never seen them himself, had used his own experience to fill in the gaps.

I know that immediately sounds as if I didn't like the food. In fact it was some of the best food I've ever tasted, and if i was manager of the Arden Arms I'd tell chef to let his imagination run wild and I'd use it as a selling point.

Maybe instead of the elephant picture I should use the analogy of a great singer who takes a song and makes it 'their own', turning a decent song into a great one.

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I have since learned that Minestrone just means 'big soup' and doesn't have to contain pasta.
and for future potential guests to Acorn Corner, Dianne has created a website, with a map showing how to get there.