WITH my cultural head fixed firmly in place, this week I headed up to Keswick to catch a matinee performance of Alan Bennett’s play, Single Spies.

Approaching the tail end of its summer season at Keswick’s marvellous Theatre by the Lake, the performance is actually two separate short plays.

The first is An Englishman Abroad, which tells the true story of a meeting in Moscow between Guy Burgess of the infamous Cambridge spy ring and the actress Coral Browne.

The second part is A Question of Attribution, a clever and funny imagining of an encounter at Buckingham Palace between the Queen and Burgess’s partner in treason Anthony Blunt who, before his public unmasking as a spy in 1979, was the personal art adviser to Her Maj.

The matinee performance was packed out - and the play was superb.

Running until October, it’s well worth a trip to the north Lakes.

Having arrived in plenty of time to take our seats and to meet up with friends, we decided to partake of a pre-performance lunch in the Spotlight cafe bar, one of two eating venues at the theatre.

Some two hours before the matinee was due to the begin the Spotlight was heaving, with a mix of theatregoers and tourists.

Food at the Spotlight is standard cafe fare, with sandwiches, baked spuds and soup forming the main part of the menu.

I ordered a chicken fajita baked potato (weird, I agree), while my husband Gordon chose a bowl of soup and a ham salad sandwich.

The soup was a thick, rich, homemade tomato broth, served with two huge chunks of delicious fresh bread and plenty of butter.

Lovely quality and hearty as could be. Popular with the punters, too, judging by the number of other customers tucking in.

The thickly-filled ham salad sandwich was also lovely and fresh, lacking only some good, hot English mustard.

While the potato element of my baked spud was good - it being large and with a fluffy centre - I can’t say I was overly taken with the chicken fajita filling.

The spicy chicken came in too small cubes and the vegetables were overcooked for my taste.

While other spicy Mexican fillings for baked potatoes work (chilli con carne being the most obvious example), this combination didn’t work for me; and I left most of it.

Gordon, however, kindly offering to “try” it, declared it delicious and polished off the lot.

After the performance - and before heading into Borrowdale for a night at the delightful Scafell Hotel - we reconvened in the Spotlight for tea and cakes and a whinge by me about the uselessness of the kind of stainless steel teapots and milk jugs which I believe are a conspiracy by the entire catering industry against their customers.

They just don’t pour the stuff properly, leaking and dribbling all over the place as if they’re incontinent.

Spilt tea and milk galore on the table was the inevitable result - with wads of paper napkins being pressed into service to mop the mess up.

Thankfully, the cakes made up for the irritating tea-pouring attempts, a thick breeze block of rocky road being the pick of the selection.

All in, our two-part eating experience at the Spotlight came to just over £40, which was quite good value, considering the theatre’s location.

And as a real cultural gem of the county, it’s great to see the cafe bar here bringing in a no-doubt healthy revenue for the theatre, which relies so heavily on the generosity of the people who use it.

SPOTLIGHT CAFE BAR AT THEATRE BY THE LAKE, KESWICK

Marks (out of five)

Food 3.5

Value 4

Service 3.5

Atmosphere 3.5

Pros

Serves all day

Yummy cakes

Licensed

Cons

Noisy when busy

Expect half your teapot’s contents to end up on the table