At the weekend we finally did just that. Inclement weather drove us to escape the house but not venture too far, so recalling this pub we drove the three miles or so for Sunday Lunch. It’s a somewhat rambling establishment with a sizable beer garden and a front dining room capturing all the charm of an eccentric’s living room.

A particular attraction of the Dumb Bell was its Ploughman’s Lunch. Tara is already a fan of the Ploughman’s in the Old Orchard pub in Harefield, and we were keen to see how this alternative offering compared.

The Dumb Bell Special Ploughman’s Lunch: £6.95
Menu description: “A hearty platter of freshly prepared salad and coleslaw with mature cheddar cheese and honey glazed ham, spicy pickled onions and homemade chutney all served with the bread of the day”
Tara’s view: Plentiful portion, nice salad, tasty homemade bread

The Old Orchard Ploughman’s: £8.95
Menu description: “Mrs Appleby’s White Cheshire and Colston Bassett stilton with bread, ham, pickled onion, apple, celery and chutney”
Tara’s view: Good cheese variety, nice thick ham

So two rather different culinary interpretations of a classic, each with their strengths. Which would you prefer?

The Dumb Bell is also worth mentioning for its generous Sunday carvery. £7.95 for slices of as many as 4 meats, if you like, and all the trimmings. Great value.

Coincidentally, we’ve been doing precisely this for the past few months, buying a good number of items from local businesses on the high street that we’d previously got as part of our weekly supermarket shop. So far, it’s proven a very positive experience.

This move began through the arrival of a new fishmongers in Rickmansworth, whose stall offers a fantastic array of fish and seafood three days a week. The level of service – personalised, offering cooking recommendations and preparing the food – suddenly revolutionised our relationship with food retailers. No longer did we struggle over what fish we should buy without knowing much about what to do with it. Now we’re given inspiration each week based on the seasonal catch, and it’s enlivened our fish and seafood dishes immensely.

This represented something of a ‘eureka’ moment for us. Perhaps the supermarkets weren’t the convenient be all and end all of food shopping. Perhaps the high street can offer us something more and something better than the dominant supermarkets.

We decided to branch out and explore our high street more thoroughly. Our weekly fish shop remains very much as the heart of what we love about the high street, but we now regularly also bring home delicious bloomer bread, along with meat and veg. It’s all good quality produce and we feel all the better for supporting local businesses at the same time.

It’s true to say that we can’t buy everything we’d need for food on the high street, but it goes to show what a difference personal service – yes that old concept – can have in the 21st century. As far as we’re concerned it still very much has a place and we’d happily see a good deal more of it.

Rickmansworth High Street – some supermarket alternatives

Rock & Sole
The new fishmonger in town provides a bewildering array of fresh fish from the South West on its stall, Thursday – Saturday

Cinnamon Square
Award-winning bread (for good reason) and a great café to boot

Chris Blake
Popular high street butchers

Mark’s Fruits
Good selection of fruit and vegetables

Wenzels
North-West London bakery chain

Our visit took in towns and villages in the south of the county of Cumbria, which is dominated by the Lake District and bordered by the Yorkshire to the east. It’s a largely rural area and famed for the quality of its livestock, the farming of which remains an essential element of the local economy, along with tourism.

Cartmel

The exploration began in Cartmel, a small village punching far above its weight owing to its racecourse, Michelin starred L’Enclume restaurant and some nationally renowned foods. There’s also the curious priory, where the tower sits at 45 degrees to the rest of the building in a piece of either architectural genius or madness.

We enjoyed perusing the village’s picturesque streets and attractive shops, universally built in the unmistakable Lakeland limestone. On a recommendation we began in Cartmel Cheeses, an emporium that would delight the most highbrow cheese aficionado. Rounds of cheese are piled high and following some tasting we emerged with some sheep cheese, creamy Lancashire, soft French cheese and Stinking Bishop. The car carried a certain aroma after that!

From cheese heaven we moved onto a sweeter sensation. For many Cartmel is best know for its Sticky Toffee Pudding and no visit to the village could be complete to the shop. In addition to more flavours of pudding than you’ll have ever seen before, there’s a fine selection of other local produce.

Grange over Sands

A few short miles from Cartmel is the town of Grange, sitting on the northern side of Morecambe Bay and commanding some impressive views that have helped cement the town as a popular retirement destination. Here we made a lunch stop at the Hazlemere Cafe, home of award winning teas and a 60-year old vanilla slice recipe. On entering you’re forced to pass the bakery with its table groaning under an irresistible selection of delights. Making a note of your favourites you then proceed into the cafe itself. There’s a good range of sandwiches on offer, all served with a assorted salad on the side, which made it a wholesome meal in itself. I couldn’t help but try the signature vanilla slice, and was not disappointed by this suitably indulgent yet sublime piece of dessert.

Kirkby Lonsdale

Lying just off the busy A65 east-west road in the very southeast corner of the county, Kirkby Lonsdale enjoys a good deal of passing trade from those heading to both the lakes and dales and has become something of a hub for boutique and specialist shops. The food at the Sun Inn, located on the high street, has gained quite a reputation of late and we were keen to give it a try, for which the £25.95 ‘favourites’ menu offers ample opportunity. Each course was full of flavour and I particularly enjoyed the local lamb, slow roasted for 8 hours making for a dish where the meat was succulent and just fell away to light pressure from the fork. A great example of local produce being celebrated.

Kendal

We spent a day exploring the pleasant bustling market town of Kendal, which lies very much at the heart of the South Lakes economy. Following another recommendation we lunched at the Baba Ganoush Canteen, not to be confused with its sister shop across the street. There’s a fabulously varied menu, reflected in us trying the lamb flat bread with mint raita and couscous and a fish finger sandwich in ciabatta. The quality of the ingredients was clear to see, and taste.

A visit to Kendal for us always means stocking up on coffee from Farrers on the high street. Something of a Kendal institution, if you like tea or coffee, you’re in for a treat at Farrers. There’s a cafe as well as counters to take away beans and leaves of your choice.

These just scratch the surface of the range of produce and restaurants on offer in and around the Lake District. Next time you visit be sure to look up those places that will allow you to taste the very best the area has to offer. You won’t be disappointed.

Calendar of events

April

Chilterns Easter Festival of Food & Drink, Great Missenden – Fri 6 – Mon 9 April

Cheese Makers’ Market, Old Beaconsfield – Sat 14 April

May

Artists and Makers’ Fair, Waddesdon Manor – Sat 5th and Sun 6th May

Rickmansworth Canal Festival - Sat 19 & Sun 20 May

Marlow May Fayre - Sat 26th May

June

Hertfordshire County Show - Sat 2nd & Sun 3rd June

Chenies & Latimer Diamond Jubilee Celebration - Mon 4th June

Marlow Town Regetta & Festival - 9 & 10 June

July

Tringe Comedy Festival, Tring, 1 – 21 July

Penn Street Beer Festival – Fri 13 – Sun 15 July

September

Chalfont St Giles Show - Sat 8 September

Berkofest, Berkhamsted, Sat 15 September

Kop Hill Climb, Princes Risborough – Sat 22 & Sun 23 September

Thame Food Festival - Sat 29 September

Other listings for events around the Chilterns

The following websites offer a more comprehensive listing of events, including museum activities and local events:

Visit Buckinghamshire Events

Herts Direct Events

Enjoy Hertfordshire Events

Amersham What’s on noticeboard

Aylesbury Vale Events

BucksFreePress Events

Watford Observer Events

Somewhat late to the party on this one, we’ve finally become an all iPhone 4 household. Tara has taken my iPhone 4, freeing her finally from the shackles of an increasingly lumbering and senile iPhone 3G, while I’ve got a new iPhone 4S to keep up with my insatiable app and podcast addiction.

It’s proven a good move – Tara finally has a phone with a battery that comfortably lasts the day and is like a gazelle to the drunk tortoise of the 3G. The iPhone 4 is quick, fit for purpose and doesn’t require a tea break when making a Foursquare checkin.

My move to the iPhone 4S is a modest improvement, but the doubling of capacity on the 4 means I’m no longer struggling for space and can crack on with adding my back catalogue of music into iTunes. The 4S also offers an increase in speed, which has cut the frustratingly long start-up time of Camera+ to something much more reasonable. It also ensures that, until such time that the iPhone 5 graces us with its presence, my device has got the necessary oomph (a technical term, you understand) to deliver the demands of the latest apps.

Nowhere is the relentless march of technology felt as keenly as in the mobile marketplace, where the passage of only a couple of years can easily turn a top-of-the-range device into a struggling antique. Trying to keep up with this fearsome pace can prove an expensive business, which is one reason why, until now, our own devices have been lagging behind a little. The recent expense of house-buying and a wedding has meant we’ve taken the view of making do with what we have, so long as it does the job. While we may envy a little those with brand new devices boasting the latest features, our phones have done the core work we’ve asked of them, and that’s been fine. However time catches up with older devices, the slowness of the iPhone 3G was becoming more trouble than it was worth, and it was time to put it out to pasture. For now we’re back up to speed, and we’ll continue to enjoy it while it lasts.

For the first time this year, we successfully brought together an entire side of the family on video chat using group video calling on Skype. Five video streams from across the UK and the USA all displayed on a single screen, everyone talking together, and it worked pretty well. Over the years we’ve tried all manner of services, including text, audio and video chat, but this is the first time that the infrastructure and technology has been able to offer something that allowed a quality of video and audio that’s enabled reasonably fluid conversation with everyone at once.

Getting the usability right by providing an interface that’s easy to use and that just works is essential for getting a broader audience on board who would easily be put off by technical issues. Aiding this ease of use is that fact that most people now own laptops that come with cameras and mics built-in. Suddenly we can all make video chats with no need for drivers and problems with third-party software. Our Christmas Skype chat needed no configuration aside from turning on the video and ensuring each person in the chat was a contact. Not exactly rocket science, and certainly a low level of complexity my parents could manage.

Group video calling from Skype isn’t free, but it only needs a single family member to be signed up to create the chat session. Following a hiatus from Skype of several years I’ll certainly now be looking at using it more regularly to keep in touch with the many distant family members.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Daniel and Tara at the Incovenient Mule!

And so it was, we loaded up our modest chariot, cramming what little we could in the minuscule boot and heaping the rest across the back seats. Our new SatNav app was set for Fishguard, and given this was its first outing, we were counting on it to take us at least roughly in the right direction. On to the M4 motorway, the Satnav instructs us to follow the course of the road for the next 180 miles. Nice and easy. Easy that was, until we reached the Newport tunnel just closed by a lorry fire. We ground to a halt at first, and then began to proceed at a pace that would not see snails break a sweat. Would we even make the ferry and get to see the shore of Ireland? Happily we eventually emerged out of the contraflow system and made best speed for Fishguard port, arriving shortly before check-in closed.

Just when we felt we were getting our sea legs onboard the ferry, Rosslare emerged from the sea fog and it was time to return to the car. We were on Irish soil, and my first precarious miles of driving abroad began. It’s just as well that Ireland makes for a relatively gentle introduction to hitting the road in another country. The core principles remain the same, such as driving on the left, but it throws in some unfamiliar elements to keep you on your toes, such as speed limits in km/h and the use of many curious road signs using the American yellow diamond format.

We were off to a steady start, possibly going at the right speed for the road, but are thrown into confusion by vehicles moving left into an area of the road marked by yellow dashes. There’s no mention of this in our guide book, so we adopt the when in Rome approach, and are soon overtaking these vehicles bearing over on the left, without really overtaking. It feels wrong, but seems to work. Some of the roads in Ireland are remarkably wide in fact, and with this left-hand area in use they become dual-carriageways, after a fashion. This is just as well as most roads allow very few opportunities for overtaking; without this extra room to manoeuvre it would take even longer to pass Ireland’s menagerie of slow-moving vehicles – comprising tractors, long lorries, pony traps and an odd trait by drivers of slowing to a snail’s pace when getting within a couple of miles or so of where they need to turn off.

It soon became clear that the Irish take a more relaxed, less up-tight approach to driving and parking than we were used to. In the UK, parking is rigorously enforced and is essentially a revenue making exercise where the smallest contravention from the extensive and varied parking rules will result in the car park owner gleefully slapping your vehicle with a ticket. Not so in Ireland, where parking follows necessity, and rampant parking on double-yellows in the congested coastal village of Baltimore is seemingly accepted because, well, there’s really nowhere else to park. Hurray for free parking all over the place – the jobsworth traffic wardens of home were not missed.

Nor did we miss the executive car drivers who plague the roads of England’s home counties; those self-important Audi, BMW or Merc owners who spend their time no more than a couple of  centimetres off your bumper, looking for an opportunity to roar past at an ill-chosen moment before inevitably getting stuck behind the next vehicle or set of lights. The Irish, from what we saw, seemed to favour practical cars, and held a calmer head to match. Wherever it was they were going, it always seemed they had time enough to get there, and would likely speak well of the journey on arrival, whatever had come to pass.

Irish roads are not without their challenges, however. While some roads are new and smooth, other main roads can be rough, bumpy, and occasionally fraught with rather lethal looking potholes; none of which are taken too well in our little car designed for undemanding urban roads. Turning onto local roads as we did on a few routes is also rather seat of your pants, being narrow or single-track and full of blind corners.

All said and done, I loved driving in Ireland. The roads simply seemed clear and unrushed compared to what I was used to. Driving actually became a pleasure, and despite my hitherto lack of enthusiasm for long journeys in the car, I suddenly found myself something of a convert. Of course our holiday inevitably came to an end and we had to return to the more crowded roads of England, but I’ve returned with a new passion for the road. Ireland showed me what driving can offer and now it’s time to discover great drives closer to home.

For the reasonably priced sum of £10 a month, giffgaff offers unlimited data, which prices it below even Three’s £15 PAYG offering. As a smartphone user, data is my top priority when it comes to network deals, yet finding data without paying through the nose has becoming increasingly difficult, as most networks have imposed strict 1GB or even 500Mb data caps over recent years.

Now these may sound like plenty of data for a mobile device to use over a month and yes, it’s fair to say that I don’t normally get near to this limit. The thing is, I’ve realised that I’ve learnt to curb my use of apps so I don’t risk breaching the limit, which has meant I’ve been avoiding media-rich content such as audio and video. I have in fact been failing to make full use of my smart phone because of data caps and it was time to put it right.

My phone and usage would be set free, listening to the morning’s news on the commute into work while checking Twitter, buying and updating apps when I’m out and about (regardless of their size), and generally being entertained and informed by whatever content out there takes my fancy. Great fun with no worries. Bonzer.

I’m currently trying out my giffgaff SIM with their £10 goody bag (150mins, 150 texts, unlimited data) and things are looking on track to move over from O2 and halve by monthly bill. Interestingly, giffgaff uses O2′s network, so I’m effectively getting the same service (plus more data) for half the price. Don’t mind if I do.

• Order a giffgaff SIM and receive £5 free credit

In favour of the proposal, firstly, is that I can read books without having them clutter up the flat, e.g. the Bernard Cornwell Anglo-Saxon series, that’re my equivalent of beach reading. Secondly, I think I would buy a greater variety of books if I had them on the Kindle. Buying a book at a bookshop is quite a deliberate and well-considered act, because one has to carry the book home and find somewhere for it. An instant electronic file is a less weighty decision in both respects. Thirdly, there’s the carrying around of books post-purchase. My George R. R. Martin books simply don’t fit in my bag, which started me thinking that a Kindle would fit nicely into the front of my satchel whatever I was reading. It would also make taking books on holiday extremely easy. Fourthly, I wouldn’t have to wait for delivery when I ordered a book. Finally, if I were to get the 3G version, I could sign up to fine magazines and have them sent to me even when I was on holiday.

Against the proposal stands, of all people, the mighty orator, author and bibliophile, Marcus Cicero, who said, “a room without books is like a body without a soul”. By buying an e-book reader, am I contributing to the decline of the physical book and the wonderful, physical bookshop? I’ve been organising my book collection obsessively since I was around five years old. I like them to show off my interests and be displayed for visitors or define the function of the study. Books make furniture look better. Secondly, some books will always need to be in hardcopy. If you were researching using more than one book, that would be very difficult using the Kindle, because you couldn’t compare the two side-by-side. Cook books, too, are better from the page than on the computer screen (although I use the internet for recipes too), as they’re less worrisome if they get covered in spatters of food. The pictures look nicer, too. Thirdly, an e-book reader can’t compete with the texture of a book and turning the pages oneself. I would still have to buy copies of books that I particularly liked, thereby reducing the problem, but not solving it. Following on from both points two and three, not all books are available to buy electronically anyway.

In conclusion, the obvious answer is to buy a Kindle and read certain books on it while buying physical copies of others where desirable or necessary. So, do let me know if you have an opinion on the subject. I’m very close to pressing the ‘go to checkout’ button, but it’s not yet too late…

The Jolly Cricketers is located in the affluent village of Seer Green, near Beaconsfield and Chalfont St Giles.

It’s a good looking historic pub on the outside, but it’s on the inside that it reveals its secret – serving up some truly fabulous food, and recently voted the best gastro pub in the South East.