The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
Gadding About Glastonbury

The Route I can't begin to tell you the joy of twelve hours of sleep! We might still be in bed except that the local rooster started announcing impending dawn at about 5am. Just to be sure nobody missed it, he kept delivering his message for another hour and a half! Ah, the simple rural life!

We did feel much more human after rebalancing the sleep account and a shower. The other nasty bit of transatlantic flight is living in the same clothes for two days. Fortunately we have a washer in the cottage so laundry is a project in waiting ... but not a project for today. Today we have serious work to do.

Task One is to find a working ATM and get some local currency. None of the units I tried yesterday seemed to want to give me money. I also need to find socks. I had compression socks for the plane, but somehow I managed to forget to bring my regular everyday ones. Annoying, but hopefully an easier problem to solve than if I needed shoes! Perhaps not, though ... at least in Glastonbury. If you missed the hippie heyday of the early 70s, it's alive and well in Glastonbury!

While the array of commercial ventures didn't skew toward head shops, they all reeked of inscense and were more often than not filled with crystals, magic amulets, natural fabric multi-colored clothing, tarot cards, obscure books on obscure spiritual topics and similar arrays of new age essentials, all with a rather seedy, if mellow, vibe. But for the lack of head shops, it reminded me of Berkeley or the Haight-Ashbury back in the day.

It was looking like finding something as mundane as a pair of normal men's socks might be more of a project than I had imagined, but after several inquiries of likely locals, most of whom seemed puzzled by the question, I was finally directed to the one shop in town that actually carried conventional men's clothing. I found one pair of socks that will work, so I've at least bought a bit of time to extend the search elsewhere.

I even found an ATM willing to give me some money. I just wish I'd thought to take a picture of the scrambled pile of cash the machine spit out. I expected a neat stack of bills and was amused to receive a loose pile of randomly folded notes. It must be a hippie thing!

At the crack of noon we jumped into our Vauxhall Mokka and headed three miles down the road to Glastonbury. The obvious dining choices were actually rather limited. I was leaning toward the pub experience, Margene just wanted coffee and something light. We compromised on the Lazy Gecko Cafe and had a pleasant light lunch in their back garden.


Commercially speaking, Glastonbury is a hippie time warp. The vibe is good, and even though it appears the residents live in an alternate universe, they're enjoying it. In the end, that may be all that really matters.


Before the Summer of Love took up permanent residence, Glastonbury was a seat of power in the British Isles. Back in the day, that meant the Church and in the 10th century, Glastonbury Abbey was England's most powerful and wealthy. It was part of a network of monasteries that by 1500 owned one-quarter of all english land and had four times the income of the Crown. Then came Henry VIII who dissolved all the abbeys in 1536 and was particularly harsh with Glastonbury, where he not only destroyed the buildings, but hung and quartered the abbot.

There's not a lot left to see, but you can get some idea of the scale of the property and what it must have been in its day. It was even the burial site of King Arthur and Guinevere. Certainly worth a look, even through a few surprise rain showers.

Margene's neck was giving her trouble again, so she begged off on dinner with Frank and Jan and went to bed. They suggested we meet at the Apple Tree Inn, a friendly-looking pub and restaurant and it was comfortably full at 7:00 when we got together at the bar. You have to start at the bar in Britain since the convention is to place all drink orders in person. If you wait for a cocktail waitress you'll have a long, dry evening.

I was impressed with the moderate prices (and, of course, the high quality of my dinner companions!), but not much else. Apparently new management had recently taken over the place and they were still stuck in the mechanics of getting food on the table. The staff was friendly enough, but nobody we met -- the manager included -- seemed to have any sense that they were there to serve people, not just meals.

They sorely needed systems. The staff needed training (although who could do it?), the kitchen needed someone with at least minimal culinary consciousness, and the manager needed to free himself up enough to actually manage rather than tending bar and running orders. Easier said than done, I know, but I figure that with proper attention to food, service, and hospitality, they could double their sales volume and become the restaurant of choice in the area. Pity that's not likely to happen ... because "that's not the way it's done here."


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