We Are Wrested from Nature’s Jaws and Nearly Killed by an 8-Course Tasting Menu «

We Are Wrested from Nature’s Jaws and Nearly Killed by an 8-Course Tasting Menu

Saturday 22nd March 2014

Val (head of Research for Dainty Lady TV ‘s deeply investigative mission to Wales) threatened the Military Museum of the Brecon Regiments but Mrs Frankie Nevil, mother of Robert Nevil, the biographer of the Pony Club, recommended some mid-Wales dams. So we set off from the Laura Ashley Hotel to commune with Nature and Victorian hydrology.

Ghastly lunch at the Visitor Centre beneath one of the Elan Valley dams. That tuna melt panini! But worse was to come at the hands of Le Relais et Chateau, I can tell you. Val had a great deal to say about ‘panini’ which is quite wrong, meaning ‘bread rolls’ if it means anything. But in the bookshop he brought ‘Favourite VW Camper Van Recipes’ x3 – thinking ahead for Christmas presents.

We motored on through the Elan Valley. There are five or six dams. We had to get them all covered, of course. Thoroughness is all at Dainty Lady TV. The biggest and most horrific (I use the term in its true Gothic sense) was only completed in the 1950s. Her Majesty the Queen opened it as one of her first engagements as Queen. I couldn’t imagine her in Norma Hartnell at this remote spot. We stood underneath it and then beside its top. Nobody else there. Just imagine if the dam had suddenly burst. Only one wild road leads to that monster crouching in the hills. Can the Royal car and party really have come along it? Perhaps it was treated as a semi-country engagement like the Grand National and she wore a tweed coat and scarf.

At the 5th or 6th dam we didn’t bother to get out of the car. Leaving the valley we saw a lovely bit of Nature done in just two colours and no trees. It really was pared down and more successful than the Snowdonia landscape we were to see later.

So, with tongues hanging out for hotel life, we approached our next hotel, the Relais et Chateau Hotel of Innisdog. ‘Oh no,’ I shrieked as our Official Car hove into view, ‘I’m not going into that Annexe.’ Val was in the middle of recounting a Barbara Cartland novel in which a milk maid so impressed the Prince Hyatt Regency with her recipe for miso soup they became lovers He did not awake at once to the danger. Then lo! and behold, where does the likely-looking hotel greeter lead us – bang slap into that annexe!

Well, that’s enough for today… our adventures with liquid nitrogen in the dining room, not to mention the 42 Roman blinds in the annexe will have to wait.