Tales of the Country: Divided by a common language

We have just set up a new website to promote our fledgling holiday-cottage business. And jolly attractive it is too. The designer, Adrian Pitt of Viper Image Media, in Hereford, asked us to supply 25 key words that, when entered into a search engine, would in due course lure you into taking a wonderful, blissfully relaxing holiday in a truly unspoilt corner of England, an England of hop fields and apple orchards, of ancient timbered villages and... but hang on, ethical considerations prevent me from using this column to promote... etc, etc.

I won't even share with you our key words, except to say that we are developing a separate website to attract American custom, a dot.com rather than a dot.co.uk, requiring altogether different words. For example, my friend Dana, who lives in Dallas and works in the travel industry, informs me that the word "homely" has negative connotations in the States. Far from evoking warmth and cosiness, as it does here, there it means plain or unattractive.

As well as certain words meaning entirely different things in America, there is also the phenomenon of Americans using entirely different words. For example, they have a tendency to turn familiar nouns into unfamiliar verbs, which I first came across a dozen years ago when driving through New England in the autumn, or rather the fall, and passing inns proudly advertised as "fully fireplaced".

Similarly, another American friend, Doree, sought my advice earlier this year regarding a weekend in the Cotswolds. She and her partner wished to go antiquing, she said. Could I recommend a hotel with great "antiquing" nearby? Accordingly, and with gritted teeth, we have made antiquing one of our key words, on the basis that Leominster, five miles away, is indeed one of the antiquing centres of England. I couldn't bring myself to call England "olde", on the grounds that I almost have to be physically restrained from tearing down signs for Christmas "fayres", but maybe it's only a matter of time before principle succumbs to profit.

Speaking of profit, what we have also done, again on the advice of Dana, is to advertise a special offer on the website, in the hope that it will appeal to Americans and Brits alike. Anyone who takes a three-day break in low season gets a free home-cooked meal supplied to their cottage. If they're lucky, it will be prepared by Jane rather than by me.

That said, Jane, despite being an utterly splendid cook, last week suffered an inauspicious debut in this exciting new lark of cooking for paying customers. She had asked Mr and Mrs W from Barnsley, due to arrive at Manor Cottage, whether they would like a home-cooked meal waiting for them on arrival, costing £7.50 per head (it should have been £9.50, but she's from Barnsley, too, and felt a wave of unprofessional solidarity, compounded by the suspicion that, coming from South Yorkshire, they might consider £9.50 a head a bit bloody steep).

They said yes, thank you, that would be grand, so she set to work creating a chicken casserole followed by blackberry-and-apple crumble, the sort of thing she can normally do with her eyes shut, and perhaps should have done, for it could not have been much more disastrous. There was no problem with the casserole, which was delicious, but the crumble was consigned to the Aga, and as we have discovered to our cost, Agas do not release cooking smells. By the time Jane remembered it, with the Ws about to arrive expecting dinner, their crumble looked as if it had passed through a blast furnace, whereupon my mother-in-law, who was staying with us, resourcefully suggested altering the menu, calling it not blackberry-and-apple crumble but Docklow mud pie.

She and Jane dealt with the crisis by collapsing in laughter so hysterical that it was noiseless, but eventually embarked upon a new crumble that was whisked round to Manor Cottage just as the Ws were stepping out of their car. Increasingly, I'm wondering whether we should add to our website the key words "Fawlty" and "Towers".

Gratin of macaroni, frogs' legs and other traditional dishes

At different times during the last 40 years I have equipped myself with different factual nuggets, reflecting what is going on in my life. When I was an expectant father, for example, I wasted no opportunity to tell people what I had learnt in ante-natal classes: that if a man's bladder were powered by a muscle as strong as the uterus, he would be able to pee clean across the River Thames.

And now that we have moved to north Herefordshire, close to the Shropshire border, I am armed with the similarly impressive fact, if not quite as fine a conversation-stopper, that nearby Ludlow boasts more Michelin-starred restaurants than anywhere outside London.

Last week, for the first time, we finally went to one of them. Our first choice had been The Merchant House, whose chef-proprietor, Shaun Hill, is widely considered to be the man who turned Ludlow into what it is today. Once he and his wife Anja had established The Merchant House, other talented restaurateurs followed, embracing the old principle that the best place to open a shoe shop is next to a successful shoe shop. Certainly, it's a practice that suits the consumer. If Russell & Bromley is too crowded you can pop into Dolcis. Which is why we didn't weep too copiously when The Merchant House turned out to be fully booked, for we had also heard good things about Hibiscus down the road. Very fine it was too, albeit 20 per cent poncier than just about any London restaurant I've been to. Maybe punters outside London expect more for their money. Whatever, there was a full range ofamuse-gueules and one very amused diner who couldn't quite believe the oregano ice-cream. "Isn't oregano something you put on spaghetti?" she asked.

The menu, generally, was like nothing I have ever seen in London, starting with the gratin of macaroni stuffed with frogs' legs, Bramley apple and emulsion of melilot flower.

But I wouldn't want to seem anything other than thrilled by the fact that we've moved to the sticks, yet can drive to a place with a menu featuring gratin of macaroni stuffed with frogs' legs and emulsion of melilot flower, whatever that is, in less time than it used to take us to get from Crouch End to Covent Garden.

Park and smile

If one thing exemplifies the lower cost of living way out west, it's parking. The car park in the centre of Leominster is free, which is such a novelty that I have on a couple of occasions driven the five miles into town just for the pleasure of ambling away from my car without having to feed an insatiable meter, or take out a loan to pay a man in a kiosk. The car park at Hereford station, by contrast, is not free. It costs £1.40 per day. At Worcester station it's an exorbitant £2 per day, which still means I can leave my car there for three whole days for what it costs to park for two whole hours in central London – and that's assuming you've deployed a spy satellite to find a space.