Bradford-on-Avon
Timbrell’s Yard
Bradford-on-Avon
Timbrell’s Yard is centrally located in busy and beautiful Bradford-on Avon, just by the river in one of the fine old buildings with cream coloured stone and appealingly wonky angles. The fact that the whole building leans back like an elderly gentleman relaxing into a favourite armchair adds to its charm. Inside we found a mixture of traditional and modern, with much use made of natural materials – lots of bare wood and stone – while distressed furniture, metal and industrial-style lighting add a contemporary spin. One enters through a flagstoned courtyard (nicely delineated with low barriers formed of railway sleepers – an idiosyncratic touch) full of tables of patrons lazily enjoying drinks, and so to the buzzing bar.
We found it a little difficult to find someone to take us through to the restaurant and thus our table, but once we had located a member of staff he could not have been more affable – an attribute which all the staff shared. Every waiter we encountered was extremely friendly and helpful whilst also being polite and professional, with only their rather informal dress (jeans and t-shirts) and worrying tendency to call us “guys” to detract (do we look like extremely combustible straw-filled dummies?). Rather incongruously, it was the slightly hippy-looking sommelier, whose looks and long locks intimated a more laid-back and casual attitude, who addressed us more correctly as “Sir” and “Madam”. Our waiter, though young, was excellent. He asked for feedback on the new item on the menu (the lamb) and duly passed it back to the kitchen. He also forgot about Tristan’s fish and when we reminded him apologised so profusely that we ended up apologising for reminding him. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard a waiter say “It’s entirely my fault”. Impressive.
The informal air is continued through to the tables, which are undressed, with no tablecloth, just a single candle in a basic candleholder and the correct glasses and cutlery. The wooden chairs are mismatched between the tables, giving an air of slightly studied casualness. Lighting is provided by a large ceiling light, somewhat industrial in tone; and the walls a light-ish honeyed grey, with the railway sleepers in the courtyard echoed in the vertical, slightly rough wooden panelling.
We found the fact that there was no music incredibly refreshing. In fact, a rather attractive light jazz was playing in the lavatories, which would have been pleasant in the restaurant as well, but the lack of popular music was an absolute joy and showed a confidence in the establishment and the pleasures offered by the food and drink. In fact, the only negative point of a “comfort” nature arose from the fact that whether by some vagary of airflow from the front door or because of (slight) leakage round the edges of the single glazing, wafts of cigarette smoke found their way from time to time into the restaurant: singularly unpleasant to non-smoking diners, and especially those concerned that their young children aren’t subjected to health-damaging fumes.
The menu itself isn’t too extensive (a too-long menu is always a dangerous sign), yet still offers a good range of options, with starters broken into three sections of three items – “little things”, ”small plates and starters” and salads – the latter as either starter or main sizes. There are then a good range of nine main course choices, with a focus on meat but with some fresh fish and also more-interesting-than-usual vegetarian options. The sides all sounded extremely homely, comforting and tempting. The back of the menu lists suppliers – all very local, with meat from Bristol, fish from Poole, vegetables from Wiltshire and organic dairy products from near Frome. Bread and cakes are from Bath’s famed Bertinet Bakery, and Timbrell’s Yard make their own ice-creams; honey and most dry goods are local, while others are fair-trade. This all seemed jolly impressive, even before we tasted the goods on offer.
The wine list, on the other hand, was just slightly disappointing in that it doesn’t offer descriptions so appears rather basic, and although there are a reasonable number of red and white choices it would have been nice to see, for example, Gewurztraminer or some slightly more unusual grape varieties or locations.
We went for a bottle of Bogle Zinfandel, which was beautifully rich and powerful; dark purple in colour, with deep, ripe black berry fruits on the nose and a dark, suave and sophisticated taste of forests, with a tiny hint of sweetness tempering the blackness. A gorgeous wine that went very well with our food.
For starters both my husband and I went for one of the light bite options. My cauliflower and smoked Dorset red croquettes were excellent; with a spicy bite (I detected the inclusion of chilli), and a very strongly cheesy smoked flavour, these were gorgeously fluffy and light on the inside and beautifully crunchy on the outside with a perfectly-done breadcrumbed exterior. They were served with a creamy mayonnaise which was needed to cut through the salty smokiness and worked extremely well. Mr Marshall-Luck’s venison chipolatas were richly and darkly flavoured and, although they were not numerous, their intensity rendered the whole very satisfying, whilst leaving plenty of room for the steak to follow. The accompanying mushroom ketchup could have answered the venison more in piquancy, but was nevertheless well textured.
The following steak was superbly flavoured and cooked: some might find it a little on the fatty side but we found that this enhanced the flavour. Not only was it a generously sized steak, especially for the price and the cut, but it was accompanied by hand-cut chips – deliciously crunchy on the outside; melting within – and a simple rocket salad, which complemented the other items perfectly, being slightly peppery in flavour, and therefore holding its own against the steak, whilst in no sense overpowering it.
My lamb, cooked with pearl barley and spinach, was the only slightly disappointing dish: the meat was not particularly flavoursome, and the texture could have been firmer and more cohesive. The pearl barley was fine, but didn’t particularly help to lend flavour, and there could have been more presence in the spinach, too. Overall, we felt a little more work was needed on this dish.
Tristan, though still only a year old, nevertheless had the fillet of sea bream from the children’s menu. This came (served with rocket and a few chips) beautifully fresh and unadulterated by breadcrumbs (a pleasing touch), and was wolfed down with the greatest of relish.
We followed the main with a cheese course – one has a choice of two out of five English cheeses. We opted for the White Lady from Glastonbury and the Dorset Blue Vinny. The White Lady was the perfect goats’ cheese – a soft, creamy cheese coated in ash and with a delicate flavour and just slightly crumbling texture. I could have sat and eaten it all evening! The Blue Vinny was also excellent – a soft, creamy cheese with a piquant bite; these two were complemented by a deliciously fruity apple chutney, thinly sliced apple and celery, all of which, together with the accompanying savoury biscuits, made for a very satisfying course.
I couldn’t resist a glass of the Noble Wrinkled from Australia – a beautifully golden colour, sublime nose of fat, sun-drenched sultanas and a slightly dark, very rich and honeyed taste of citrus fruits tempered by lashings of honey and nectar. It worked beautifully both with the cheeses and with the following dessert. This, the chocolate and sea-salt caramel tart, was very well done, except that (an all-too-frequent complaint in British restaurants) the pastry was a little on the tough side. The chocolate, however, resisted the temptation to be too sweet and the sea salt brought out the flavour well. It was accompanied by extremely sticky honeycomb; a tried-and-tested combination with chocolate which brought an extra dimension to the dessert. The ice-cream, with a slight lemon flavour, was a little more incongruous but by no means unpleasant.
We also ordered a vanilla panacotta for Tristan. I cannot comment on this, as Tristan ate every last morsel, including with the very (and naturally) sweet rhubarb that it came with –but I think we can take this as a definite sign of approval.
We finished with tea and coffee and even this impressed. Tea was Clipper’s organic English Breakfast and very good it was too, whilst the coffee tended more towards the Germanic / Austrian end of the beverage – that is to say that it met my husband’s extremely high expectations, in being actually drinkable by him and not something that could pass for tepid dishwater. No petits fours – but, to be honest, these weren’t necessary and perhaps would have been slightly incongruous in the setting and with respect to the tone of the meal.
By the end of the meal we had managed to stay a good couple of hours later than intended (making for a relaxed evening of a good four-odd hours) – but we were never made to feel that we had out-stayed our welcome; it ended being one of the most enjoyable review meals we’d had for some time. Warmly recommended.
Iraq Liars & Deniers: we knew then what we know now
Iraq Liars & Deniers:
we knew then what we know now
Ilana Mercer is vindicated by history
“If we knew what we know today, we would not have gone into Iraq”: This is as good an apology Republicans vying for the highest office are willing to offer, 12 years after launching a war that was immoral and unjust from the inception, as some of us pointed out from the inception, cost trillions in treasure, tens of thousands of lives (American and Iraqi), and flouted America’s national interests.
The big reveal began with Jeb Bush, who told anchor Megyn Kelly that knowing what we know now about Iraq, he would absolutely still have invaded Iraq. Broadcaster Laura Ingraham was having none of it. With the benefit of hindsight, she had arrived at the belated conclusion that the invasion was wrong. Ingraham suggested that Bush III was insane for sticking to his guns about Iraq.
Next to disgrace was Sen. Marco Rubio, also in the running. Six weeks back, Rubio had been unrepentant about the catastrophic invasion. After The Shaming of Jeb, Rubio changed his tune.
The title of Judith Chalabi Miller’s “rehab book tour” is, “If we knew what we now know ….” Over the pages of the New York Times, Miller, the Gray Lady’s prized reporter had shilled for the Iraq war like there was no tomorrow. In her reporting, she channeled Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi conman who fed Miller with misinformation and lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The other conman was Bush II, president at the time. His administration assisted Miller—a woman already prone to seeing faces in the clouds—to tune-out and become turned-on and hot for war (also the title of a January 2003 “Return to Reason” column). No tale was too tall for our Judith; no fabrication too fantastic.
Miller’s “mistakes,” and those of America’s news cartel, are no laughing matter. But it took a Comedy Central icon to deconstruct her national bid for redemption. The fact that others were on board, Republicans and Democrats, is not exculpatory. Idiocy is bipartisan. Not everybody got it wrong. Miller and her ilk chose not to consult those who got it right.
Miller had company. The Fox News war harpies were certainly a dream come true for many American men. Who cared about honest reporting or basic fact-checking when a heaving bosom is yelling from the screen, “Sock it to Saddam, Dubya!”?
In any event, the meme, “If we knew what we know now, we would not have gone to war in Iraq,” is false; a lie. We most certainly knew what we know now as far back as 2002, which was when this column wrote:
Iraq is a secular dictatorship profoundly at odds with Islamic fundamentalism. No less an authority than the former head of the CIA’s counterterrorism office, Vincent Cannistraro, stated categorically that there was no evidence of Iraq’s links to al-Qaeda. Even the putative Prague meeting between Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of Sept. 11, and Iraqi intelligence, turned out to be bogus. … Iraq has been 95-percent disarmed and has no weapons of mass destruction, an assessment backed by many experts in strategic studies.
The column excerpted was published on September 19, 2002 in Canada’s national newspaper. On that day, the flirty notes and the gracious dinner invitations from America’s leading neoconservatives ceased.
Indeed, there were many experts, credible ones, who categorically rejected the contention that there were WMD in Iraq. But they were silenced; shut out by the media—the Hannitys, the Millers, the dissidents, their handlers and their followers—none of whom should be allowed to deflect from the intellectual and moral corruption it took to invade a Third World country whose military prowess was a fifth of what it was when hobbled during the Gulf War, which had no navy or air force and was no threat to American national security.
Eleven years ago, “What WMD”, courtesy of WND, documented the same old verities. No, not everyone was bullish about the Bush administration’s WMD balderdash. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council before the war: There were no nuclear-designated aluminum tubes in Iraq; no uranium was imported, and no nuclear programs were in existence. Between 1991 and 1998, the IAEA had managed to strip Iraq of its fuel-enriching facilities, tallying inventories to a T. In David Kay’s late-in-the-day assessment, “Iraq’s large-scale capability to produce and fill new chemical weapons (CW) munitions was reduced, if not entirely destroyed, during Operation Desert Storm and Desert Fox and 13 years of U.N. sanctions and U.N. inspections.” Kay was the former top U.S. weapons inspector who endeared himself to the media as an invasion enthusiast.
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), Congress in 1999 was privy to intelligence reports which similarly attested to a lack of “any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox (1998) to reconstitute its WMD program.” Accounts of this nature had evidently been available to Congress for years. These reiterated, as one report from the Defense Intelligence Agency did, that, “A substantial amount of Iraq’s chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998.”
“Kay’s news ought not to have been new to the blithering boobs in Congress,” I observed in 2004. The CEIP further bears out that in October of 2002, Congress was apprised of a National Intelligence Estimate, a declassified version of which was released only after the war. Apparently, entire intelligence agencies disputed key contentions that the administration—its experts, and its congressional and media backers—seized on and ran with.
While clearly pandering to policy makers, U.S. intelligence reports were still heavily qualified by conjectural expressions such as, “We believe Iraq could, might, possibly, and probably will.” The State Department and the White House, however, cultivated a custom of issuing Top Secret “fact” sheets with definitive statements from which all traces of uncertainty had been expunged.
Having categorically denied she possessed the analytical wherewithal to connect the dazzlingly close dots between terrorism and Arab men practicing their aeronautical take-off skills stateside—Condoleezza Rice was suddenly doing nothing but connecting disparate dots. She, Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush never stopped lying about a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear-weapons program, chemical and biological blights, Scuds and squadrons of unmanned aerial vehicles streaking U.S. skies, and traveling laboratories teeming with twisted scientists. The language they deployed ignored the deep dissent in the intelligence community.
All the above information addressing pre-war knowledge has been culled from WND’s early, “Return to Reason” columns.
In 2003, “Bush’s 16 Words Miss the Big Picture” beseeched our readers to “see Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was”:
The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework, it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes—it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.
By all means, the column implored, “dissect and analyze what, in September 2002 I called the “lattice of lies leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible meetings with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized.”
“But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you?”
“Rationalize with Lies,” moreover, dealt a blow to the creative post hoc arguments made to justify the unnecessary war the United States waged on a sovereign nation that had not attacked us, was no threat to us and was certainly no match for us. The argument:
“To say that Saddam may have had WMD is quite different from advocating war based on those assumptions. It’s one thing to assume in error; it’s quite another to launch a war in which tens of thousands would die based on mere assumptions, however widely shared. It was not the anti-war-on-Iraq camp that intended to launch a war based on the sketchy information it had. The crucial difference between the Bush camp and its opponents lies in the actions the former took.”
Second, it matters a great deal when during the last decade someone said Saddam was in possession of impermissible weapons. To have said so in 1991 is not the same as saying so in 2003, by which time Iraq had so obviously been cowed into compliance and was crawling with inspectors.
Naturally, at certain times during Iraq’s belligerent history, opponents of this war would have agreed Hussein had a weapons program. But by 1998, sensible people realized that Operation Desert Storm, followed by seven years of inspections, made the possibility of reconstituting such a program remote. President Jacques Chirac said as much to both Bush and Blair, who pretended not to hear.
To arrive at the correct conclusions about Bush’s undeniable delirium for war, it was necessary to employ facts and reality, Just War Theory developed by great Christian minds like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, the libertarian axiom which prohibits aggression against non-aggressors, the natural law and what the Founding Fathers provided:
“A limited, constitutional republican government, by definition, doesn’t, cannot and must never pursue what Bush and his neoconservatives were after: a sort of 21st-century Manifest Destiny.”
Republicans are still fond of presenting their opponents with the following false choice: “But what would you have done about Iraq?” they are in the habit of asking me. The assertion is intended to make you assume incorrectly that something had to be done about Iraq. However, “The burden of proof is on he who proposes the existence of something like WMD, not on he who claims that it does not exist.” That line was penned 12 years ago.
In the early days, Iraq had provided “documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD.” I recall the derision and mockery with which the Bush administration and its hangers-on greeted what turned out to be the only truthful document in the sad saga of Iraq.
ILANA Mercer is a US-based, libertarian writer. She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive, paleolibertarian weekly column, “Return to Reason.” With a unique audience of 8 million, the site has been rated by Alexa as the most frequented “conservative” site on the Internet. Ilana has also featured on RT with the “Paleolibertarian Column,” and she contributes to Economic Policy Journal (the premier libertarian site on the web), Junge Freiheit, a German weekly of excellence, as well as to the British Libertarian Alliance and Quarterly Review (the celebrated British journal founded in 1809 by Walter Scott, Robert Southey and George Canning), where she is also contributing editor. Formerly syndicated by Creators Syndicate, Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank).
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