104 High Street, Bildeston, Suffolk

God, I must be the worst restaurant critic in the world. Last week I travelled all the way to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast to try out the best fish and chip shop in England and arrived five minutes after it had closed. This week I shall top that by celebrating a fantastic pub restaurant on the basis of the food I didn’t eat there.

When I check out of a hotel on a Sunday morning after a weekend in the country, I like to get on the road immediately. I hate all that palaver of leaving your bags at reception, then idling away the time till lunch stealing things from charity shops and throwing rocks at the old people coming out of church, eating and drinking too much, and then falling asleep at the wheel and killing nine people.

So after checking out of Aldeburgh’s Brudenell Hotel, we set off pronto for a slow wibble home along the B-roads, which give you a much nicer sense of progress through the country and throw up far more diverse objets de conversation in the way of history, architecture and roadkill. The plan was to stop for lunch after a couple of hours as soon as we saw a nice little pub at the right sort of time. So casual. So relaxed. So devil-may-care. And so, so not me.

For a plan like that is fraught with problems. To begin with, what if you happen upon a perfect little thatched pub with a brief and enticing menu, using eggs from its own chickens and herbs from the garden, at quarter past eleven? You can’t have lunch at quarter past eleven. You can have lunch from about 12.45. So you have to hope that until that time you do not see anywhere nice, for having passed it by you will then compare everywhere you come to later against it, and kill your Sunday with regret for the chance not taken. And then supposing you do happen upon a lovely little spot bang on lunch o’clock? How do you know there isn’t an even lovelier place in the next village? I just can’t enjoy a good local pie and a pint of Adnams if I’m worrying that two miles up the road there might be somewhere with a slightly better view. Or nicer plates.

Which brings us to the problem of the 1.15 panic. Up until quarter past one, you can be reasonably fussy about where you stop. But as soon as you hit 1.16, every pub you pass could easily be the last one for 40 miles. And then it will be half past two and everything will be closed. At 1.12pm, you pass up a little place with a hog roast in the garden and beer from its own micro-brewery being poured at the table by resting Playboy models in Heidi outfits, just in case the next place has a duck pond; at 1.24, you’re literally sprinting across the car park at Happy Eater, hoping they’ve still got a table.

And then there’s the problem of the countryside running out, as can happen so quickly in the South: one minute it’s all hedgerows, windmills and dormice in little hats punting along the Cam, next minute you’re into the real England of endless mini-roundabouts and Morrisons car parks, and you might as well press on for a Big Mac at Shepherd’s Bush.

It’s a minefield, I tell you. A minefield.

And then the random flopsy I was travelling with (we called her Charmaine last week, so we’ll call her that again, or she’ll look cheap) made everything soooo much easier by saying: “Come on, we don’t need anything flash. I’m happy with a ploughman’s on a wooden picnic bench by a stream.”

Oh really? Just a ploughman’s on a wooden picnic bench by a stream? You might as easily ask for a really good Chinese in Belfast with a fun wine list and views of Kilimanjaro.

So anyway. We’d been pootling westwards for a couple of hours, admiring the one or two remaining hedgerows and singing along to Tristan und Isolde on Radio 3, when we came into a village called Bildeston and saw a pub.

“That looks nice,” said Charmaine.

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