Double meeting with my old friend Roy (From The Oxford Times)

Double meeting with my old friend Roy

3:15pm Wednesday 14th July 2010 in

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t might not have been the greatest of coincidences but I did think it odd that I should have bumped into my old friend Roy Ackerman during two arts festivals last week hundreds of miles apart, having not seen him anywhere at all during the previous year.

I had last been in Roy’s company on July 14 last year at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons at Raymond Blanc’s lunch party to celebrate his 25 years there. It was at this splendid establishment that Roy — a man of enormous influence in the catering world — launched his first Ackerman Guide in 1987.

Having pulled it from my bookshelves to supply the illustration above, I turned to its Oxfordshire entries and discovered what a wholly different world of eating it celebrated: The Restaurant Elizabeth, La Sorbonne, Fellows Brasserie — all of these in Oxford — The Red Lion in Steeple Aston under Colin Mead, The Harcourt Arms at Stanton Harcourt, which introduced the great George Dailey (now at The Bell in Hampton Poyle) to the county’s discerning diners, and Thatcher’s, the Thame establishment famously trashed by the Oxford University dining/destruction club, The Assassins.

My first meeting with Roy last week was at the Henley Festival, an event which he was instrumental in setting up and which in two years’ time will be marking its 30th birthday. We were sitting at adjacent tables at the festival’s offshoot of Heston Blumenthal’s Hind’s Head pub, in Bray. Both of us sampled the various dishes featured there, including tea-smoked salmon, pea and ham soup, Scotch eggs and venison burgers.

The next day, Rosemarie and I drove north to the Buxton Festival, a smashing annual event to which I had been introduced a couple of years ago by Trevor Osborne, the property developer who performed wonders on Oxford’s Castle site and is now working to revive Buxton’s spa and associated buildings, including its lovely 18th-century Crescent.

He is on the board of directors, whose chairman (and, yes, that is how she’s styled) is the High Court judge (and Shipman Inquiry chairman — ditto) Dame Janet Smith. She astonished me and Rosemarie two years ago when we met her in Buxton by turning out to be the stepmother of our Witney-based dentist. This year we met her after the entertaining talk on Saturday morning by one of my favourite novelists, Patrick Gale (pictured right). He and I met later at the excellent production of Verdi’s Luisa Miller. Patrick, a Winchester chorister and later an undergraduate at New College, was enjoying it as much as I was.

Earlier in the day, I had also enjoyed George Benjamin’s opera Into the Little Hill, a two-hander (Susan Bickley, Claire Booth) I heard at the Oxford Playhouse earlier in the year. It was while walking back to our hotel from this that I came across Roy again. He was waving at me from the interior of an old railway coach which had been taken to the festival — stuffed with curiosities — by Hendrick’s gin. Roy was holding a ‘shoot’ (if that’s the word) for his coolcumber.tv website. This supplied an excuse, of course, for a thorough tasting of the wares.

What I hadn’t realised before either of our meetings was that Roy had, on Monday, been presented with a Lifetime Achievement award at the Catey’s, the food industry’s equivalent of the Oscars. I therefore didn’t congratulate him — which deficiency I make up for now.