The long road back

Chef Mark Hix is starting over

When you are struggling to keep afloat during a pandemic, and the restrictions it brought in its wake, there isn’t much time to step outside yourself and have any perspective. But this past week – with a memorial service, a trip into the English Channel to catch sea bass, and a visit from my nine-year-old daughter – has given me a strong sense of past, present and future and how they intertwine.

In the present, I’m writing this on my friend Darren’s boat, in a rare quiet moment escaping the crowds in Lyme Regis, as we head out on a bright summer morning from the harbour at Portland towards what fishermen call ‘the Race’, the spot in the English Channel where two tides meet. The waters are, as a result, choppy, so I will have to get this down on paper before we get there.

The careless can easily get into trouble in the Race, causing it to be referred to sometimes as the Bermuda Triangle of Dorset. The seabed comes up closer to the surface and mussel beds attract sea bass who feed off them. There is even the occasional dolphin if you’re lucky – there was one playing with paddleboarders on Charmouth beach the other day.

Darren and I go back a long way. We were at catering college together in Weymouth many moons ago. Where I threw my lot in with London, he always kept a foot in both camps,

I’m escaping the crowds in Lyme Regis, heading out from Portland harbour towards ‘the Race’, in search of sea bass

based in Dorset but up in the capital for part of each week to run a fish and game stall in Borough Market.

If the sea bass are there when we arrive, it is a good sign that other fish – sardines, mackerel and whiting – are also heading closer to the shore and will be in abundance in the weeks to come to satisfy my customers in the restaurant and pub dining room, and on the fish truck. The summer rush means that I often have a queue waiting for me when I open up on Fridays and Saturdays next to the A35, as Lyme Regis’s latest tourist attraction.

So those are present needs and customer demands sorted out for the time being. Earlier in the week, though, I took a day off to head for Worcestershire to attend food critic Charles Campion’s memorial service. He was another old friend, and among the first in his columns for the London Evening Standard to champion my restaurants. What we shared above all was a love of British food and a fascination with the who, how and where of those producing it.

Charles was always tipping me off about brilliant cheesemakers he had discovered and, when I was writing a book on British regional food, he was encyclopedic in his knowledge. In what was an age of big-ego, highprofile food critics, Charles didn’t always get the credit he deserved. He was the first man to spot the trend towards pubs serving high-quality food. He even coined the term ‘gastropub’, as useful back then as it is now, and one that sums up what I am doing at The Fox Inn.

The memorial service should have been a sombre occasion where it was hard not to reflect on what inevitably awaits us all beyond the daily round of worries and work that takes up all of my headspace – Charles was only just over a decade older than me. Yet his spirit infused the gathering with his dry humour and jollity. I can’t help thinking as I sit here – because Charles was a fellow fisherman – how much he would relish being on the English Channel this morning in search of sea bass.

If saying a proper goodbye to him brought home the passage of time and those lost on the journey, then the perfect tonic was awaiting me when I got back to Dorset. It is school summer holidays and my daughter Isla was down for a few days.

We headed for the estuary near my house so I could show her how to spot the samphire, sea beet, sea asters and sea purslane that are growing near our beaches in abundance at the moment, and make delicious ingredients with the right recipe.

She was a keen apprentice forager, eager to learn. I had to wait much later to discover what a life-enhancing joy wandering the shorelines with eyes down can be. My grandfather Bill grew vegetables and flowers but we never went to wild places to find ingredients. I had to teach myself as an adult. Passing on that knowledge to Isla is therefore planting something in the future.