And so it was time last Wednesday to be a birthday boy again (my 68th, since you ask) – one day ahead of The Princess Royal, to whom I used to be compared. This was in the matter of our uncontrollable hair, a problem now solved in my case by no longer having any, on top of my head at least.

Princess Anne is the one member of the Royal Family I have met in a non-official way, at a charity event at Windsor racecourse. “You’re a bit orf your patch, aren’t you?” she said, on learning I worked for The Oxford Times. I owned at once to a reckless addiction to travel.

My birthday found me eager for the orf. The initial idea for Rosemarie and me was a train trip to Moreton-in-Marsh and lunch in or around the town. Then it struck me we could travel farther along the Cotswold Line to Great Malvern for an overnight stay at The Foley Arms, a famous historical hotel as we shall see presently.

As a rare(ish) treat we booked first-class, thereby avoiding the horror of the bum-numbing ironing board seats in standard on the new Great Western Railway class 800 hybrid trains. These seats, incidentally, so annoy journalist Matthew Parris that he last week offered (in his Spectator column) a £200 bounty for anyone who can name their designer.

First-class seats proved more yielding to the posterior as we settled into ours, having been helped aboard from the rain-lashed platform by the smiling attendant.

She proceeded to dispense, “with full and unwithdrawing hand” (John Milton) such bounties that GWR placed at her disposal in the way of sandwiches, coffee, cakes and crisps. (We had our own gin and tonics, scooped up ready chilled from M&S at the station.)

The feast rendered lunch surplus to requirements when we reached The Foley Arms, with the prospect of a siesta an alluring alternative. So it was up to the top-floor room of large dimension, whose wide window opened on to a magnificent view down and across miles of the Worcester flood plain.

It was surely for this splendid sight that the hotel was built in 1810, in the early days of Malvern’s development as a spa town. This was almost entirely at the behest of local landowner Lady Emily Foley, who was to Malvern what the 5th Duke of Devonshire had been to Buxton.

At the height of the hotel’s Victorian fame, it supplied six weeks of residence for Princess May of Teck, whose magnificent coat of arms is displayed above the front door. She became better known, of course, in the next century as Britain’s formidable Queen Mary, great-grandmother of the aforementioned Princess Royal.

With such grand connections, it is strange to think the hotel is now part of the JD Wetherspoon chain, a down-market operation, as it is perceived.

In hotel terms, in fact, the perception is wide of the mark. Ones I have stayed in – in Weston-super-Mare, King’s Lynn, Chesterfield and Bridport – have all been as pukka as one could wish.

Whether I should have been in them, bearing in mind boss Tim Martin’s, hard-line Brexit views, is another matter. But I have never let political disagreement stand in the way of a good night’s sleep.

An admirable policy of the group, in all its pubs and hotels, is to display photographs focusing on the history of the place.

Thus at The Foley Arms we are shown its strong Oxford connection, with picture’s of Christ Church’s W.H. Auden, who taught for three years in the mid-1930s in Down Prep School, in nearby Colwell. One shows him with Benjamin Britten, his collaborator in the GPO Film Unit and later co-tenant of a New York house in the unlikely company of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Britten’s brother, Robert, taught at another Colwell School, The Elms.

Auden was pally (until a a fall-out in the 1960s) with J.R.R. Tolkien, another regular visitor to Great Malvern, along with his fellow ‘Inkling’ C.S. Lewis, who had been a pupil at Malvern College.

Opposite The Foley Arms, at The Unicorn pub, there is a plaque on the on the wall alluding to the patronage of Lewis who, like Tolkien, was famous for his love of ale. The Unicorn appears to have been a Worcestershire equivalent of their beloved ‘Bird and Baby’ (The Eagle and Child), in St Giles.

Writing from Great Malvern in 1947, Tolkien reported: “Only one really good inn, The Unicorn, which is all you could desire in looks and otherwise. The Herefordshire cider is astringent and thirst-quenching.”

We found Wadworth’s golden beer Horizon no less so (thirst-quenching, I mean) when we called into this mighty friendly place at the climax of the Liverpool-Chelsea football final. I doubt Tolkien and Lewis would have approved of the seven (!) big television screens on which it was being watched.

They would surely have relished the hearty camaraderie on view, though, and – both careful with money – would have approved the modest outlay (£2 a pint) required in promoting it.