A few weeks ago, we went for a very unpleasant birthday meal at The Lodekka pub in Bristol. Since then, one reader of my blog, namely Simon, pointed out to me that I should not be surprised to have been served up rubbish, haven chosen to eat in Bristol.

You will all then be surprised that yesterday we decided to return to the same pub for our Christmas meal. Why did we decide to eat at the place which served me something so foul? The simple answer – we had already booked and paid for the festive dinner.

So how was it? The fact I am blogging the following day shows I haven’t been poisoned to death. I am not blogging from a hospital bed either (I know the wards are equipped with WiFi these days). The most surprising thing about the whole evening was the quality of the meal!

The head chef at the pub had clearly read my critical review the other week, sacked his colleagues, replacing them with trained chefs, before taking a basic cookery class himself. Yes, it was edible. I would even call it “OK”. Oh what the hell, it’s Christmas! The meal was NICE.

I’ve been for many Christmas dinners in the past with work and to be blunt, they haven’t been very pleasant at all. I seem to recall blogging about them all, so a quick dig through the archives will show you what I mean. This one, however, pleased me.

Yes the starter of tomato soup could have been from a tin, but the main was really hot, well cooked and accompanied by the biggest Yorkshire pudding I have ever seen. Mick McCarthy (the most northern man on the planet) would be proud of it. To top it all off was the dessert. A bowl of custard with a slab of deep-fried Christmas pudding in the middle, and I normally HATE Christmas pudding! The fact this calorific treat was covered in molten fat made all the difference. I’ll try not to think about what it has done to my insides. My arteries have only recovered from that battered Mars Bar I had in Grimsby two years ago.