It took but one spoonful of the asparagus soup to convince me this was going to prove a memorable dish indeed. Nevertheless, I pressed on, hoping that the spoonfuls that followed were going to be more easy to swallow. They weren’t. This was memorably awful soup. After three or four mouthfuls I gave up. It had been a bit like trying to eat the bristles of a brush. Eyeing my still-full bowl when she came to clear away the plates, the waitress expressed surprise that so much remained. “I am afraid it’s inedible,” I explained, drawing her attention to the pile of fibrous bits on the plate underneath the soup bowl. These had been picked from between my teeth. “It’s quite obvious,” I said, “that the chef forgot to chop the woody ends off the asparagus before cooking it.” The waitress – bright and courteous, as were all the staff we encountered here – returned from the kitchen shortly after to say that this had indeed been the case. Now he would be throwing away the whole batch. But was this really necessary, asked Rosemarie and I, neither of us entirely unfamiliar, to be frank, with this kind of kitchen calamity. Could he not simply strain the soup? Ten minutes later, when we were well into our main courses, the waitress returned to say he had taken our advice, and would be delighted to have my verdict. Would I mind trying a bit? Not at all. So a tasting followed, and the restyled soup passed with flying colours. No doubt it will have been much enjoyed by other customers later in the day, its refreshing taste of summer set off by a judicious quantity of herb oil and crispy bits of baked parma ham. All this occurred, I must say, while the Merry Miller’s staff had no inkling of my role on this newspaper and certainly with no reason to think I was among them ‘on business’. It was to their credit, then, that they handled my complaint so well. The cost of the soup and crusty bread (£4.95) was deleted from the bill. For good measure (and unknown to us until I looked at the bill much later) the £5.50 for Rosemarie’s starter had been struck off, too. In the conversation with the waitress she had been mildly critical of the industrial quantity of whole black peppercorns – a good tablespoonful, she estimated – in her otherwise excellent ragout of wild mushrooms and Oxford Blue cream sauce. I must make clear, too, that all this happened on a day when the Merry Miller’s top man in the kitchen – Rob Waldram – was on a day off. Rob and his partner Jackie have been in charge here now for almost nine years, earning the place a good name for the quality of its food (much of it sourced locally, like the asparagus) and drink. A Greene King property these days (where isn’t?), the pub was once a Morland house (remember them?) known as the Fleur de Lys, though it stood closed and boarded up for some years in the 1980s. There had been insufficient demand in the village for the drinkers’ pub it had been. Ah, but which village – or rather hamlet? I had always been used to calling it (everyone does) “the Merry Miller at Cothill”, but I noticed, having driven there in the sunshine for our Friday lunch, that a sign just before we reached the pub car park told us we were in Dry Sandford. Jackie was able to solve the mystery: this large pub, decorated in delightful style as George Reszeter’s photographs show, actually straddles the boundary between the two places. Eat al fresco on the pretty terrace (see right) and you’re in Cothill; penetrate further in and you’re in Dry Sandford which, with so many good beers on tap, can easily be made a wet one. A bottle of South Australian semillon/chardonnay was our choice of tipple at lunch, which turned out to be an ideal accompaniment to Rosemarie’s main course, if perhaps not mine. She went for fish pie, which featured good quantities of salmon and smoked haddock in a white sauce heavy with the flavour of dill. The cheese-coated sliced potatoes on top were a tad underdone; the accompanying vegetables (broccoli, carrots and cauliflower) were fine. From the range of speciality stonebaked pizzas, I chose the classic Four Seasons. This featured good crispy-edged dough (if a bit thicker than I had been led to expect) and generous quantities of the toppings: pitted black olives, pepperoni slices, sautêed mushrooms, mozzarella, anchovies and capers. There was too much of it to finish, so I obviously passed on a pudding. Rosemarie fulfilled our duty, however, with a hot chocolate fudge brownie and ice cream which fully passed muster.