You don’t quite fully appreciate the state of London's roads until you’ve ridden them hungover on a bike with loose spokes. Every pothole, every segment of patched together concrete, tarmac tectonic and fallen traffic cone conspire to send shudders up your rock shox to pain central in the cerebral cortex and back down your spine to the ground from whence they came.
I’ve been doing a fair bit of hair of the dog riding recently, determined to not let copious boozing infringe on the morning hours any longer. I’m at an awkward crossroads in my life, where Viceland is losing its appeal, pints at gigs and free cocktails merge into one long memory loss. The natural, wholesome world is beckoning but I’m not quite ready to submit to sensible trousers and compasses for birthdays quite yet. I ride to work in stupidly unfashionable clunky New Balance, revelling in their comfort and all-around appropriateness, before ditching them for flat, pointless hipster shoes from Brick Lane before being seen by anyone I know.
Back to potholes. There’s no potholes on the ride across the heath to The Spaniards Inn, just a platoon of No Cycling signs spray painted onto the tarmac that criss-cross the greenery like backpackers’ bad tribal tattoos. So you have to walk, which is alright as I usually go there on a Sunday, hungover and wincing too much to actually ride.
Birthplace of both Dick Turpin and Keats’ ‘Ode To A Nightingale’, rural muse for Dickens, Bram Stoker and Karl Marx, The Spaniards Inn is a pub steeped in literary history way before this masterpiece. And arguably the best roast in London. I don’t take that accolade lightly. It’s a crown that few wear for long, (most recently the Crown And Goose in Camden), easily stolen and dependent on multiple criteria, which – in the spirit of blogbrevity - I’ll discuss elsewhere.
Politely overlooking the we’re-out-of-the-chicken-and-the-lamb lack of choice, roast beef was generous, succulent, fatty and smothered in gravy thicker that a Holloway street urchin. Joining it were an all-too-small handful of perfectly seasoned and crispy roasties, carrot and herb puree that was just this side of pretentioux, broccoli, and leeks, an unexpected guest at this suburban flavour-swapping orgy. It was the perfect combination of quality and not quite enough quantity that made me want to order another, if that didn’t involve another hour-long wait. Strawberry Fruli and a spicy Cab Sav were my poison while she had summer ale, although there are more varieties of drink here than there are types of cobbled together rustic furniture in the huge garden.
The Spaniards is perfect: creaking floors, knackered armchairs in board game-strewn snugs, open fireplaces, oak beams. It’s all chalkboard signs and too much information; the hens out the back had a longer biography than Nelson Mandela, which made that emotional bond between them and the well-behaved children tucking into roast cousin Plucky all the stronger. There’s a doggy wash outside. It’s the perfect embodiment of city countrylife, offering four hours of quasi-rural joy before we slip back into the grubby confines of our metropolitan dream.
