Meeting up with a former colleague coming from the other side of the county we needed a halfway house – so what better than a former coaching inn?

The Coach and Horses on the main A35 at Winterbourne Abbas has had a bit of a chequered history, with a sudden closure last year.

Now very much open for business again, in a new, fresh format, it fitted the bill not only geographically, but because it serves food all day.

With 10 years to catch up on, our gossip-laden interlude at 2.30pm probably didn’t do full justice to what’s on offer – there is a 100-seater restaurant with chargrill and pizza oven and a Sunday carvery, as well as the airy coffee lounge area, which is where we found ourselves.

Neither of us in the mood for a full lunch in the mid-afternoon, we scanned the menu which is full of variety and stopped talking for long enough to order.

We both picked a starter.

I was very pleased with my choice, the Stilton, pear and hazelnut tart, with salad garnish.

It was a creamy quiche, with plenty of nut crunch, but not too blue in the cheese department and inappropriately fruity for a savoury dish.

It’s been said before, but chef, please be careful with raw onion in salads – I love it, but with work to go back to, I had to extract it from the salad, and for people who hate it, their salad can be inedible.

My companion said his Jamaican jerk chicken salad was fine, as far as it went, which was perhaps not as far as the West Indies but he could not pronounce it memorable.

We both picked traditional puds – a blueberry bakewell and cream for him and a treacle tart and ice-cream for me.

Both did what they said on the tin, but there were no crunched up cornflakes on the treacle tart, which put us both into school dinner nostalgia mode for a bit.

In all, the perfect location for our meeting and maybe which should give it another try when there’s time to sample more – and rabbit on a bit less!