The long road back

Chef Mark Hix is starting over

‘You’re busy,’ customers keep remarking as I chat to them. ‘You must be making plenty of money.’ I can understand why they come to that conclusion. The summer rush in my pub and restaurant is continuing into September undimmed. So when I reply, ‘Well, I’m not losing any right now’, they think I am being coy. If only.

When you take on an old Dorset pub, as I did mid-lockdown with The Fox Inn in Corscombe, of course you expect the maintenance to be expensive, but you also hope that such bills will go in cycles, with fallow periods when your profits aren’t all draining away into new gas tanks, rewiring and fixing dodgy plumbing.

Perhaps it is because everything has been so well used these past few months with so many customers coming along, but there always seems to be something wearing out and in need of costly replacement.

All of which means that I am keeping a tight grip on my ebay addiction. These online sites have memories like an elephant. The alerts just keep cropping up on my phone: ‘You bought such and such, so we thought you’d like this.’ And I can’t resist a quick peek. So far my willpower is proving strong enough. No rash purchases of some object that I like the look of; my first priority right now is to keep breaking even.

How far will Covid numbers have to climb before talk turns to social distancing and worse?

I am feeling a quiet pride in taming a habit that has been with me for almost as long as I’ve been earning. Better still, I am busy recycling some of the boxes of ‘stuff ’ I have accumulated over the years.

The next bedroom we are doing up for overnight guests at the pub is going to be called The Fishing Room, so I am decorating a whole wall of it with the vintage fishing rods that I used to be obsessed with buying.

Don’t get me wrong, there is light at the end of the tunnel for the business financially, but getting back on our feet after Covid is going to take a lot longer than I – or some of my customers – thought possible.

At least the employment situation is starting, slowly, slowly, to get better. We’ve taken on a couple of new people, but we are still down on the numbers we need for the restaurant if we are ever going to be able to open again on Mondays. Finding a place to eat on a Monday evening is now getting to be as hard as finding a genuine bargain in your local junk market trading as an antiques centre.

Having sidelined ebay, I’m putting my surplus obsessive energies into the kitchen garden. It’s a perfect place to retreat when there is too much Covid anxiety spinning round in my head. Recently, for example, I’ve been noticing that more of the guests are wearing face coverings than previously.

Is it greater worry about catching the virus at a time when numbers down here in Dorset are rising quickly? And how far will they have to climb before the talk turns to social distancing, reduced numbers in public places, and worse?

I find it calming to get on instead with planting new salad leaves in the polytunnel to replace the ones that have been doing so well all summer. Right now I am experimenting with some hardy winter varieties, but where I am all at sea is with the caterpillars who have invaded my sprouting broccoli.

I try to serve locally sourced, organically grown food, so spraying the broccoli with some chemical pest killer is out of the question, but I am running out of other ethical options.

It is at times like this that I could do with having my Bridport grandfather, Bill, on hand. He knew his way round a garden and the time-honoured ways of keeping it healthy. Without him, it’s trial and error. With plenty of error.

Not unlike Jeremy Clarkson. I’ve been reading – I’ve no time to watch television any more – about his tribulations with his collapsing polytunnel in his DIY farm series (Clarkson’s Farm). Not unlike my own, I reflected, when we first put it up just in time for a spring storm to blow it straight down again.

It’s how you recover that counts, though, I tell myself, and that is what I am focusing on.