Marlow

About ten o'clock I inflated my tyres and got under way.

I meant to ride toward Oxford by a leisurely and circuitous route, along the windings of the river, past Marlow and Henley, and so I began by crossing Cookham Bridge, a wooden or iron structure, I scarcely remember which.

It spanned the Thames close by the village.

The curious will find its exact position marked in the maps of the period.

One might almost have imagined a splendid triumph of the scene painter's art, did one not know that it was actually a river of fire, overwhelming, consuming, and destroying every object before it in its devastating progress.

I tried vaguely to discover the source of the disaster.

Looking straight upstream past Bourne End and Marlow, I described with bleared and dazzled eyes a whiter mass than any, glowing fiercely in the daylight like an electric light, and filling up the narrow gorge of river towards Hurley and Henley.

I recollected at once that this portion of the valley was not usually visible from Hedsor Hill, and almost without thinking of it, I instinctively guessed the reason why it had become so now.

Oh! Like, dead simple steak and chips, but it's something that, I mean, everybody knows, everybody loves, and it's been on the menu since we first opened the Hand of Flowers 21 years ago, in some formal version, because...

I think when it came to opening a business, and particularly for me, we opened the Hand of Flowers, which is a pub in Marlow.

And you go, there always has to be something there that everybody recognises and knows.

And steak and chips, I think you expect on a pub menu, no matter where, even though from where it started to where we are now, is a very different space to even as we intended to open.