Buy your coffee beans, have them ground, Gaggia and Bodum kit for sale as well as old sweet jars full of bright wrappers and lots of bars of chocolate.

A fabulously unpretentious, comfortable, welcoming cafe which wears its history, tradition and quality on its working sleeve and oh, to smell the coffees - roasted just next door, the smoke and steam bellowing out into the street before you!

Fine, local home-made food and a sweet counter to drool over with fabulous Cumbrian tray bakes.

Many of the Cumbrian market town dwellers look down on Carlisle and many areas have all the character and panache of a sodden sponge skewered on the branch of a wintry tree in a park in Ordsall but John Watts is to make any Carlisle visit worthwhile to the power of 100.

City Centre pedestrianised area, just down from HSBC

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There's a cool looking toy shop and a well stocked Deli (oppo the Bookshop). There's also the narrowest hotel in the world...but otherwise a place badly in need of a kick up the noughties. No kids either and a horrible religious neo-con atmosphere in some places, culminating in the "singing potter" - bible bashing pot thrower who'll scare you to death should you venture inside - don't bother, the chintzy, dusty, drab earthenware visible in the window should be warning enough.

If I return it will be to enjoy the under-rated Southern Uplands (great walking & mtn biking, Grey Mare's Tail is a good spot for kids and adults alike, the waterfall stunning after rain and all set in a dramatic glacial U valley). As for the town itself, well it's all a bit disorientating. You're served by poor young blighters of Moffat, so prim and unsurly in serving you and so surely repressed by a ruling OLD order no doubt entrenched in cobwebs in the town hall - you want to offer em a free bus tkt to the bright lights of Glasgow (city, fun, music, dancing, sex) - honest - all these things are possible in the outside world. The Best Western hotel off the Market Place is all the proof needed that this is a town lost up its aged self - a fabulous looking building, inappropriately refurbished, externally at least, with a a garish perversion otherwise seen only in the axminster of the box room round your grans.

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Can't vouch for the stock! but a friendly, helpful owner...bringing you down to "Moffat-time" after you've hurtled up the M6 in that "2001"-type-rush thats possible in the flat borderlands north of carlisle. As for Moffat itself: a haven for bus tours and it shows, the cafe's look cutesy but they extend for miles behind a genteel fascade, to cater for millions of pensioners stopping for a wee on their bus tour to Balmoral! Forget nice coffee, cake or even decent locally produced fry-ups. Its in a country kitchen stylee but its as formulaic, dated, bland and tasteless as your nearest DFS.

Moffat, Southern Uplands, Scotland

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