Sunday

I'm not a writer nor pretend to be one, sometimes it is simply nice to record something you have lived like let's say...yesterday. Peter and I really didn't wish to travel too many miles we just wanted to go for a Sunday lunch somewhere near, that wouldn't involve a long journey. Where could we go? was the question. I had seen, as we often travel through a picturesque road, a really sweet looking white pub with a chimney stack, puffing blue smoke, so I ventured to suggest maybe going there for lunch, not knowing whether this was a risk worth taking or not, but we stopped there anyway. Once inside, the pub was really charming with wooden beams on the ceilings, velvet red covers on the dark mahoganny carved seats; very inviting we thought and we were right. The name of the pub was the Aleppo Merchant. Intrigued, I enquired about the name of the pub to the bar-man since Aleppo, is not by any stretch of the imagination in the U.K. so why this seemingly exotic name ? He told us that a very wealthy Welshman beyond the dreams of avarice from Llangollen had stopped there over night and he had made his wealth in Aleppo... the second oldest city in the world, located in Syria. He told us this merchant had made his fortune in the silk route selling sheep wool, and that Aleppo was not far away from the Mediterranean sea. It was really, very relaxing to hear this interesting tale as we had our drinks over lunch.