Pub Odyssey 12

Tuesday 29 March:  BAKER ARMS, BAYFORD ( Malcolm Allen, Chris Haden, Mike Horsman, Gerry Murphy, Elvis Pile, Bob Polydorou, Andrew Swift, Roger Toms, John  Westwood).

COMMENT:  Six (idle but shrewd) drove to this pub, three (mentally challenged) cycled there.  It's uphill all the way, and if it is less than five miles from Tewin, even as the crow flies, I will eat my bicycle. I am not a crow and all I know is that I did eight miles in all and spent the last two behind Andrew's rear wheel climbing pretty steeply from the Lower Hatfield Road to the pub.  When I got there the first pint barely touched my sides on the way down. The heat was on for me in other ways too. Call me sensitive, but I got the impression that some of our gallant band were becoming unnecessarily obsessed with the implications of going out to lunch with sweaty men in tights.

The Baker Arms turned out to be a McMullans pub with, yet again, decent pub food and a nice barmaid/waitress who was not fazed by our bizarre behaviour as we paid the bill.  Andrew Swift's personalised cashback system may not have puzzled her, but it certainly baffled me at the other end of the table.

The Baker Arms has nothing to do with baking, despite the fancy baker's hat embossed on the polo shirts of the barpersons.  It's named for the Baker family who were the local landowners, and built the row of cottages which includes the pub in the mid 19th century.  A little surprisingly, the pub is a grade 2 listed building.  I looked the Bakers up and they seemed an uninteresting bunch.  There most prominent member was Sir William Baker, a wealthy merchant who in the 18th century attended Parliament for a few years and didn't do much there except hang around the Kit-Cat Club.  What they did at the Club I don't know, except that it didn't have to do with chocolate. (It also didn't go in for uninhibited all round sexual intercourse and kinky dressing as does the Kit-Cat Club of Berlin today.)  This lack of pzazz is very disappointing; surely the Bakers could have produced something better than a mere malingering fop given the cast list of homicidal monarchs, crazy politician's wives, mad bad poets, insane walking champions, and juvenile architects connected with previous pubs on the Odyssey. Still, you can't win them all.