The Storyteller: Lucky Paignton win sparks folkloric Dartmoor memory

Who doesn’t like a jacket potato? Last week, I was lucky enough to win a free one from a recently established food outlet just off the seafront in Paignton, known as The Spud Shack. It’s run by David and Hayley and has been in place for only nine weeks but has already amassed around 3000 followers on Facebook...amazing!

As a result of this milestone, they offered a free jacket potato, with a choice of topping, to 5 people chosen at random from amongst those followers, and I was one of them! Apparently, I was actually the first winner to claim my prize, and I strongly urge the others to do so too, soon, as they are delicious, and we must all spread the word so that everyone flocks to the seafront to taste their wares.

Eating a potato in this way, reminded me of my days in Bristol, working at my father’s Civil Engineering firm, prior to me going off to drama school, in the early 80s, when the Spud u Like franchise was all the rage. Many a time, I used to meet up with my best mate, Paddy, and we would put the world to rights over a jacket potato. In those days my favourite topping was egg mayonnaise with cheese, and David and Hayley have promised me that option will be on the menu when the weather warms up, but for now I settled on chilli with cheese, topped off with crispy onions and sour cream...yummy!

Over my time on Facebook, I’ve liked many pages that have promised you a prize for doing just that, but this is the first time I’ve actually won anything. However, this win has reminded me of my time working in the Box Office of the former Festival Theatre, now the Vue Cinema, with an attached eatery, back in the late 80s, when I had an unusual “winning streak” during the week following my first attempt to locate the Pixie Cave, at Sheepstor, up on Dartmoor. This has now prompted me to dub that area of Paignton Seafront, between the old theatre and the hardstanding outside the Leisure 2000 arcades, where The Spud Shack is situated, as my “Lucky Spot”...

As soon as I “discovered” Dartmoor, back in 1987, with all its glorious folklore, one of the first places I wanted to visit was the Pixie Cave. Marked on the Ordinance Survey map as being on Sheepstor. I erroneously presumed it would be easy enough to find. So, armed with our offerings of pins, bits of fabric, and coins for the wee folk, as instructed by my research into the cave, we set off, only to find that this tor, overlooking the picturesque Burrator Reservoir and the village that shares its name, is much bigger and rockier than you could imagine. Having spent a whole afternoon climbing and searching, we finally had to admit defeat...a subsequent visit, with someone in the know, led me to it straightaway, and I finally got inside, and I have done so many times since then...but we didn’t want to disappoint the Pixies by not leaving our offerings, so we selected a random outcrop of rock that looked like someone small might live there and secreted our gifts inside it in the hope that they might be found and put to good use. Then we returned home, content in the knowledge that we had at least tried.

Above: Spotting the Pixie Cave on Sheepstor

That following week, during one of my shifts in the Box Office, a customer tried to purchase their tickets with a dodgy credit card. The card machine flagged this up, with instructions to ring the issuing bank, which I duly did, and I was instructed to cut the offending card in half in front of the customer, informing them that their transaction had been declined. From what I can recall, that particular customer slunk away without their tickets. I then had to post the two halves of the card back to the bank. In those days, for carrying out this rather awkward act, you were rewarded with £50 for your trouble, which arrived within a couple of weeks, thank you very much, and went straight into my pocket, much to the disgust of my colleague, who was also serving on the window that day and thought I should have shared the windfall, but it was me who had actually dealt with this nefarious customer on my own. I regarded this as the first part of my good fortune that particular week.

On the following Friday evening, the Festival Theatre hosted what was known as “The Midnight Matinee,” which was a charity event starring all the acts that were appearing in the various Torbay theatres throughout the summer season, making it a very popular, must-see show. I managed to get some tickets for it, and, as it was for charity, there was a raffle draw, with some quite respectable prizes, sourced from various local businesses, so I bought some tickets for that too. Imagine my surprise when one of my numbers was called out, announcing that I’d won Sunday Lunch for Two at the Imperial Hotel in Torquay, no less! From what I can recall, that was rather an enjoyable experience when we went to claim our prize.

So there we have two examples of good fortune that came my way following an act of kindness to the Pixies, now followed by a third, all these years later, unfolding on almost exactly the same spot, and with a pixie connection too, for my Facebook avatar, that was selected at random by David and Hayley, shows me sitting on a giant toadstool at Pixieland...

Thanks once again to The Spud Shack for bestowing on me this delicious treat and for plugging a gap in the fast-food market in the Torbay area. I can’t encourage others enough to come along and sample their wares, straight out of a traditional potato oven...no microwaves here...and I look forward to visiting them again soon, especially when egg mayonnaise is on the menu!