We went to Mr Pook’s Kitchen in Castle Douglas while on holiday in the south-west of Scotland, an oft-uncharted piece of the UK even to the keenest travellers, who’ll shrug at the names Gatehouse of Fleet, Borgue and Dundrennan before making a tremendous dog’s dinner of pronouncing Kirkcudbright (it’s Kir-koo-bree, by the way).
I know this only because I spent so much time here as a child, leaving pieces of my heart on the beaches close to what is glamorously called the E18 Euroroute or, more specifically, the A75 portion of this Euroroute that links Stranraer to Gretna. The beaches of south-west Scotland are not Santa Monica-esque: they are craggy, windswept and sometimes unprettily mole-coloured, yet I have pined for them over the years, and for the misty views across the Solway Firth and days drinking Barr’s cola on a deckchair beside my mother’s sky-blue Austin Princess, reading an Oor Wullie annual, with trips to rudimentary beach cafes that sold Scotch pies in paper bags and iced buns, which were a hotdog roll with a sugary pink top flecked with hundreds and thousands. Some days we rarely saw another soul. There was a sense that the south-west, not far from our home in Carlisle, was our secret; meanwhile, the rest of the holidaymakers were off up north, demanding the full tartan and Trossachs tourist experience.
