Juliet has been pickling cheese. Her kitchen table is covered with a dazzling selection of jars and pots full of marinating feta. She said it needed a few more days but we ate a fair bit before we went out for dinner. I could have stayed there all night, and forgotten the planned pub meal. It's hard to beat bread, cheese and pickle.
The pubs I remember from my childhood were all about booze and crisps. Country pubs were private members' clubs for locals - working men at that, but they've been re-colonised by the middle-class female of the species. It's a grey-squirrel, red-squirrel situation. The lunching lady has more time, spending power and friends than the solitary geezer, and slowly but surely, these women, who are not indigenous to pubs, but are believed to have escaped from kitchens all around the country, are eradicating the weaker male specimen from his habitat.
A few people have recommended the Swan in Southrop, Gloucestershire. Crucially, Kate Moss seems to be its official famous customer. This new wave of country pubs needs official famous customers. Moss patronage means as much in the country pub world as it does in the world of handbags and hair product. I suppose the Swan's what you'd call a gastro-pub. The menu features 'pommes frites'. Not so long ago I wouldn't have felt that comfortable asking for pommes frites in a boozer, but the entire national pub-grub paradigm has shifted, and we're definitely in a better place.
The dining room is all weathered York stone and stripped antique pine; the menu a bewildering mixture of French, English, Italian and Thai classics. Juliet's fish soup was the real deal, a bona-fide brothy bouillabaisse with a salver of accompaniments: croutons, aioli and emmental. I had the Evesham asparagus, peeled and buttered, to start. The village pork listed as 'brochette' was good, though, served almost pink. Juliet was pleased with her monkfish, but got in a bit of a mood when I asked if she fancied the cheese selection. 'Never order the cheese if it says "a selection of cheese" on the menu, they're not taking it seriously!' she says and she's probably right. She is the leading authority on cheese. I ordered it anyway and she had a nibble on the Roquefort despite herself. Cheese must be an easier thing to get right than a chocolate-and-ice cream extravaganza, or whatever the Swan's 'penang gai faa' is, and yet it is still very rare to find a pub that does good cheese. Maybe Kate Moss and the lunching ladies don't have a taste for it. I also went for the hot-chocolate fondant with vanilla ice cream because it said 'allow 10 minutes' in brackets next to it. That's always the right choice. There was too much of it when it came and some people would say that was a good thing.
There are half a dozen other places where you could safely take your poshest auntie within striking distance of the Swan, places where once you could only have taken your country cousin. Which is nice, but I do wonder where the pub geezers get their beer now, and whether or not someone should classify them as endangered.
· Read more from Alex James on our brand new food blog, Word of Mouth
· Alex James's autobiography, Bit of a Blur, is out next month (Little, Brown, £16.99)
