My sweet wife

I have no idea why it’s always such a stressful journey when we go and visit Sophie and Tom. Okay, it was always fine in Wimbledon and on the Isle of Wight but, for some reason, once they moved to Bath, the trip to them has been fraught.

This weekend, for instance, we went up to visit. We booked a B&B in a small hamlet called Laverton (which appears to be Anglo-Saxon for ‘Signs are a nuisance’) and drove passed it on the way to them because we couldn’t check in until 3pm. We then hit the awful non-logical roundabouts of Radstock before finally arriving at their house an hour and a half late.

Of course, the weather wasn’t helping. We were driving through Storm Deidre and she decided we’d love lashings of rain with everything else she could throw at us. It was not pleasant and not always visible. Still, we were careful and we made it unscathed.

Sophie was ready with lunch and we almost instantly sat down to feed before checking out the changes since our last visit. There’s been a lot. (I’m not going to mention the front because it was just rubble, waiting to be completed for our next visit.)

Inside there’s been quite a lot of painting. The kitchen has been brightened up a lot and the small back room that I thought was nothing but a lean-to is now a proper room with French doors and big window. The living room has been given a coat of bright paint as well as the black ceiling beams. It all looks so much more welcoming.

The back garden is almost unrecognisable. An Indian sandstone path leads down beside the garage with a lovely arched fence on the right (replacing the chain link one) and a decked area with fire pit (ready for the summer) and a hot tub (ready now) before reaching the log cabin which was a very pleasant place to sit and chat and have a drink.

As you can see, the weather didn’t really improve though Tom in shorts was a surprise.

There’s a strip of gravel leading down to the rest of the garden where Boris is supposed to go to the loo but, as Sophie informed us, he prefers the gravel. While this makes it easy to see, it is annoying that the gravel will need to be constantly replaced as it gets scooped up.

Our cosy time in the cabin abruptly ended as we headed out into the weather once more in order to get to our B&B before the check-in cut off of 6pm.

The little hamlet of Laverton is a delightful little spot in a valley that nestles alongside the Henhambridge Brook. Our Boutique Guest House, the delightful Wheelbrook Mill, I assume, was once a mill that was powered by this brook. Laverton itself is now home to a lot of retired people (like barristers) who want the whole place to never change. This includes signage. While a big problem, this wasn’t the worst thing.

To access Laverton, if coming from the Radstock direction, your satnav might direct you to turn off the A362 at Buckland Dinham and head down the aptly named Cock Road. Don’t do it. Don’t even go on the A362. Find the A36 to Frome and go that way. You’ll thank me.

Being silly, we followed Maxine’s directions and headed through Radstock and out on the A362, turning off onto Cock Road for what has to be up there with the day we met the tractor on the narrow road in France. Fortunately we didn’t meet a tractor or, in fact, any other traffic. This was a very good thing as the road was often barely wider than Max.

Eventually reaching the second bottom of Cock Road we stopped where Maxine directed us to. There was no sign that we could see and the guest house wasn’t obvious. As it turned out, neither of these things are especially surprising, given the other residents of the hamlet.

We decided to drive on a little bit but were no wiser until we came to the top of the hill leading out of the hamlet. There, hidden on a stone wall with moss over it and barely legible writing was the 8″ x 10″ sign. It was painted light grey and the writing was in a slightly darker grey.

The sign (and I really need to think of another word because ‘sign’ doesn’t really describe it) pointed back the way we had come. We once more stopped where Maxine had indicated and there, low down near the ground, again hidden from view and too small for anyone but a Shetland pony with excellent eyesight to find useful, was the sign for our guest house.

We drove in and parked and I went and knocked up John, our jovial host. And he was exceedingly jovial. So jovial that he made the mistake of calling a now very tense and irritable Mirinda, sweetie. At the time I thought this was rather strange because she looked nothing like a sweetie.

She was obviously not feeling 100% because she let it slide though I saw the remains of Storm Deidre flash just behind her eyes. We went upstairs and settled in for an hour before heading back to Sophie and Tom’s for dinner.

Soon enough though we were back on the road and up the increasingly horrible Cock Road. Earlier, I said the mill was at the second bottom. This is because Cock Road inclines down from the A362 so much that it feels you’ve reached the bottom. The fact that there were 30 foot puddles of water across the road and schools of salmon leaping across also lent credence to it being the bottom.

This is not so. Shortly after the occasional ford, the road starts to go up a bit before plunging once more, down to the mill.

Anyway, we headed back through Radstock, mixing up the cloned roundabouts and almost headed to Glasgow before we somehow, miraculously, managed to get on the road out of town and towards Peasdown St John.

Back at Sophie’s (they’d been in the hot tub just sitting back and enjoying the rapidly improving night sky and laughing at people in cars down narrow roads) we were given a saxophone recital of Christmas songs to calm us down a bit after our hell ride. It was very entertaining and (almost) worked.

After dinner and drinks in the log cabin, we eventually girded our loins for the return trip to Laverton. Of course we were used to it by then and the rain had stopped.

We made it to the mill without meeting any traffic on Cock Road and can only hope that we never, ever drive down it again!