Fire in the belly

My 'lunch date' yesterday took me, with neighbourly escort, to the Robert Ransome pub-restaurant - one of three in Ipswich owned by JD Wetherspoon which now has nearly a thousand outlets in the UK, and opening ever more, all with the same menu and consistent quality and a daily changing special which, yesterday, was 'Mexican Monday'.

I chose the naked burrito - the spiced rice, peppers, beans and meat filling of the regular burrito but without the tortilla wrap, washed down with a glass of Devil's Backbone, an American beer with a distinctively British taste, brewed under licence in England, making the meal an international near-equivalent of the traditional English ploughman's lunch - perhaps better described as a peon's picnic, which means pretty much the same thing.

Talking of ploughmen reminds me that Robert Ransome was the man who in 1803 invented (by accident, it is claimed) a new design of ploughshare which swept the farming world and was adopted as a new standard, setting this local blacksmith on the road to a business venture which was to become the largest plough and agricultural equipment manufacturer in Britain, growing from one employee in 1789 to over 3,000 people at its height in the 1960s.

Ransome was clearly a man with fire in his belly, as was I, quite literally, after my hot lunch at the eaterie named after him in the town where his seed to succeed was sown.