cache for questions

Here's a map of a short walk we did with some friends when we went up to Leicestershire to visit them for New Year. We had, collectively, five kids with us, so a twenty-mile route march was out and in any case would have cut unacceptably into drinking time. We ended up performing a slightly complex set of manouevres involving a car in order to ensure that smaller people who didn't want to do the whole walk and might potentially get a bit whingy and risk PISSING ME OFF had an opt-out and in the end it was only three of us (me, Jim and Nia) who did the whole route (around five miles) on foot. 

No claim will be made by me here that this was the most exciting or challenging walk ever, therefore, but I offer it up nonetheless to illustrate that if you're interested in what goes on around you you can find quite a bit to interest and intrigue even on a short, low-level walk such as this.

Start and end point was at our friends' house in Stathern, which I have obfuscated the exact location of just in case anyone decides to go and burgle it. We then walked along the road towards the neighbouring village of Harby before heading north just after the old railway bridge and linking up with the towpath of a disused canal before making our way into Harby, where we had a couple of pints in the pub and then headed back via the more direct on-road route.

Some points of interest along the way: firstly the old railway bridge and the railway it used to carry. This was the slightly cumbersomely-named Great Northern and London and North Western Joint Railway which meandered its way around Leicestershire in a mainly north-south direction. Its main business was goods but there were passenger services (ending pre-Beeching in 1953), and there was a station serving both villages called, imaginatively, Harby and Stathern, whose approximate location is marked by the purple star on the map. As with any station designed to serve two communities, it was roughly equidistant from each and conveniently accessible from neither. 

As if that were not interesting enough, Nia reminded me to have a look at my geocaching app and see if there was anything in the vicinity. I discovered not only that there was, but that there was one right under the railway bridge - cue a lot of scrambling around until we eventually found it under a log by the side of the northern bridge abutment.

I see I've mentioned geocaching a few times on Twitter before but the only mention on this blog seems to be in this post from 2008 wherein I was a bit sniffy about it. Well, all I can say is that was pre-kids and it's a lot of fun hunting them out with the kids and gives them a little bit of extra impetus to agree to outdoor activities. The link earlier in this paragraph includes details of the app, of which there is a free version more than good enough to facilitate some entertaining hunting; give it a go. Top tip: take a pen with you as quite a lot of them have log books and only the really lavishly-appointed ones have an accompanying pen, still less one that works.

some more fun #geocaching up in #Wentwood woods at the weekend. Alys was very chuffed that her sharp eyes spotted this one before her sister did. also a bit weird that all the Wentwood geocaches have Papa Lazarou in them barking HELLO DAVE at me pic.twitter.com/1k14TDjjat

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) August 27, 2020

So then there's the canal - this is the old Grantham Canal which ran from, you've guessed it, Grantham, to West Bridgford on the southern outskirts of Nottingham (and where I went to school for a couple of years in the early 1980s - I mean, not in the canal specifically) where it joined the River Trent. It's pretty reedy and silty and overgrown these days though still just about recognisable as a waterway. 

Finally, once we'd squelched along the muddy towpath to Harby we called into the Nag's Head for a couple of reviving pints. They'd evidently done their research and knew we were coming, as they'd facilitated a nice home-from-home vibe by having Brains SA on tap, and very nice too. Needless to say we lingered a while longer then we'd originally planned, so when everyone else piled into the car to head home the remaining three of us had to stumble back along the road in the dark. Luckily the roadside verges were fairly wide and my phone flashlight was just about up to the job of helping us see where we were going and avoid getting killed by occasional speeding cars. While we're on the subject of pubs we also called into the Montero Lounge in Melton Mowbray on New Year's Day for lunch. 

Finally, my mention of Melton Mowbray there reminds me to remind you that if you're visiting the area you will be in the middle of both Melton Mowbray pork pie country and Stilton cheese country, so make sure you eat some. I'm not big on blue cheese but I did ensure I ate a pie while I was there. 

running for president

A couple of follow-up observations on earlier posts:

Firstly, I notice that politicians continue to embarrass themselves by attempting to ingest mildly intoxicating grain-based fermented fluids through their facial orifices in a way approximating what actual normal human beings would do in similar circumstances. The pictures below of Zac Goldsmith and Boris Johnson during a promotional stunt for Goldsmith's toxic (and thankfully unsuccessful) 2016 campaign for London mayor are the perfect example of this: Goldsmith genuinely seems to have no idea how to hold a pint glass and his facial expression after a very tentative sip is that of someone taking their first ever sip of beer. I mean, I should add that I almost certainly made a very similar expression after my first ever taste of beer, but I took the precaution of being about twelve and not on camera at the time.

Boris Johnson has at least (assuming he started with a full pint) managed a respectable quaff, although his facial expression suggests at least the faint possibility of it coming straight back up again.

Anyway, the other thing that politicians do, now that youth and vibrancy are supposedly the desirable things in politicians rather than, say, competence, trustworthiness and an absolutely massive beard, is make a point of being photographed running. Obviously the most convenient time is when just leaving or, better still, just returning to your house, as then you can just skulk round the corner and, at the most opportune moment, arrive back at a sprint and go: oh, good morning, everyone, sorry, just been out for a run, hahaha, what, these old things? just my running gear, bit sweaty, hahaha, anyway, must get on, cheerio! Nothing will convince me that Michael Gove, to pick the most obvious example, actually moves his lower limb appendages rhythmically back and forth thus propelling his entire autonomous corporeal module along laterally at greater-than-average speed for any reason other than to provide the flimsy illusion of being an actual normal human being for the minimal amount of time necessary.

My first recollection of politicians doing this sort of thing was during Bill Clinton's presidency, though of course human beings of a degree of political celebrity have run before. But I think it's more prevalent now than it was, via David Cameron and his disturbing habit of making what I assume is his pig-fucking face while out running, to Boris Johnson and his absurd outfits. It's not just British politicians - Nicolas Sarkozy used to do it and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is conspicuously sporty. I mean, fine, if that's genuinely your thing, but otherwise I think everyone should probably just Stop It.

Secondly, with reference to the recent-ish review of The Godfather and my reference therein to the bizarre episode with Lucy Mancini and her cavernous vagina, which I also mention here, it occurs to me that the canonical enormous vagina reference in fiction is its occurrence as a repeated theme in Jean M Auel's The Clan Of The Cave Bear and its sequels The Valley Of Horses and The Mammoth Hunters - there are three more books in the series but this is the point at which I got bored and drifted off to other things. 

The series' main protagonist, Ayla, has lots of exciting adventures, but a key plot thread is her desire to find a man who can fully occupy her, erm, cave, and, in parallel, the story of rugged hunter Jondalar and his desire to find a woman with whom he can, erm, sheath his spear in a full and satisfying way. I think one of the reasons I got bored with the books - which were big, doorstop-y tomes anyway - was the shift of focus away from the stuff about the rise of the Cro-Magnons (and the parallel demise of the Neanderthals) and towards a series of soap-opera-esque plot contrivances to force Ayla and Jondalar apart and back together again, complete with some furious spearing upon each reconciliation. It seems odd in hindsight, these being books I read as a teenager, to recall that I got bored because there was too much sex and not enough other stuff, but there it is.

soon may the bloggerman come

This seems at first glance like it fits into the lookeylikey category, but strictly it doesn't as I'm very confident these are literally the same people in two different (but thematically linked) contexts, and indeed locations.

Anyone who hangs out on Twitter for any length of time will be aware that trends come and go, things happen, literally everyone is talking about them, they mutate into memes that people copy, retweet, etc., then five minutes later they've been forgotten. Already in 2021 we've had Bean Dad Twitter, Tasing Himself In The Balls To Death While Doing A Terrorism Guy Twitter and now Sea Shanty Twitter. 

Those of us with a cultural connection to Wales will of course puff ruminatively on our pipe-stems (made out of a hollowed-out daffodil in the traditional manner) at this point and chuckle indulgently at the kids suddenly discovering the joys of close-harmony male voice singing, as this is something of a cultural fixture over here. And there is something rather magnificent about a group of Welshmen of a certain age, probably with a couple of fortifying pints of Mr. Brain's finest ale inside them, belting out Men of Harlech or something similar.

Anyway, while perusing one of the latest of the mashed-up multi-layered versions of Wellerman, the current undisputed number one Twitter sea shanty, I noticed that someone had tweeted a link to this rather splendid rendition of Bully In The Alley, a song in a very similar style ("bully" in this context is apparently one of the seemingly limitless collection of words that just means "drunk"). The thing that immediately grabbed my attention, apart from the barrel-chested magnificence of the guy leading the singing, was the white-bearded guy on the left of the line-up. I felt sure I'd seen him before. Here he is:

Fortunately I am blessed, or perhaps cursed, with a prodigious memory and I recalled almost immediately where it was. When it was was slightly more hazy, but a bit of searching through some old photos yielded this, taken in a shop doorway (presumably chosen for its pleasing acoustics) in Swanage in 2009. 

While the bearded guy on the right with the distinctive shorts and thumbs-in-pockets stance is clearly the guy on the left in the video, notice also how the guy next to him with the distinctive hairline and left-hand-on-ear pose is almost certainly the guy leading the song in the YouTube video. Just a minute there, Sherlock Columbo, you'll be saying, this is all a bit speculative; white-bearded guys in shorts and sandals and rotund types with their fingers in their ears must be ten a penny in folky circles. And I hear what you're saying, but a bit of research (including reading the text below the YouTube video) reveals that these guys are members of a folk troupe called Kimber's Men. If you look carefully at the contents of the open case at the bottom of the Swanage photo you'll see that these guys are offering CDs for sale, and, although the resolution is a bit sketchy, I think you will agree that the upright one is the one pictured here.

Further evidence is provided by the alternative rendition of Bully In The Alley delivered here - the bearded guy in the middle is pretty clearly the guy on the left in the Swanage photo. Just to be clear, this smaller group is Kimber's Men, the large group in the first YouTube video presumably being swelled by the presence of a load of other singers - it was apparently captured at the Deal Maritime Festival in September 2013. 

If you follow the link to the Kimber's Men website above you will note that the white-bearded guy is absent - this is apparently because he died in 2017. His name was Joe Stead and he was evidently something of a legend in folky circles. 

Traditional British folk music carries an unpalatable whiff of real ale and Morris dancing to most people (not that I am averse to the whiff of real ale, as you know) but it's something I like a lot, in carefully calibrated doses. To be honest the fact that it's a thing best enjoyed live in a slightly cramped and sweaty pub just adds to the attraction for me. The reason that Kimber's Men were hanging out in Swanage in the first place was because our visit in 2009 happened to coincide with the Swanage Folk Festival, and I cannot deny that among the many musical acts on display there was quite a bit of Morris dancing, most of it thankfully centred on the wide open areas on the seafront (the esplanade, if you will) rather than in the pubs. Pictures from that trip can be found here.

my session obsession confession

I was in Tesco the other day perusing the special offer shelf for beery bargains, as one does, and I spotted this beer that I hadn't seen before.

So this is Clockwork Tangerine from the Brewdog brewery. It's listed as one of their "seasonal" offerings, which makes sense, nice hoppy IPA being a good summer drink lending itself well to being chilled in the fridge on a hot day. It's not completely clear from the description whether the citrus flavour derives solely from the choice of hops, or whether there really is a whack of tangerine flavouring in there. I assume not, but you never know.

I'm generally well-disposed towards Brewdog - their waterfront bar on the Bristol Bridge is a cool place, particularly in summer, the beer is generally very good, and there is a vast range of different stuff to try. My principal reservations are the general air of hipsterishness, the astronomical price they charge for the beer, and the fact that in general it's a bit too strong for my liking. Their flagship brew Punk IPA, for instance, is very nice, but 5.6% is a bit severe, particularly for a chilled IPA the whole point of which is to quaff large volumes of it on a hot day, and furthermore I'm reluctant to shell out six quid for four miniature 330ml cans of it when I could pick up six half-litre cans of, say, Tanglefoot (which also chills quite well, incidentally) for about the same price.

Back to the strength thing, though: note the legend next to the ABV statement of 4.5% here: "CITRUS SESSION IPA". I recall boggling in a very similar way over another beer of similar strength which was labelled in a similar way but which I couldn't remember the name of until I remembered I'd tweeted about it at the time:

Blimey, back when I was a boy "session beer" didn't clock in at 4.6 percent. pic.twitter.com/LQWCNmEsD1

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 9, 2017

This turns out to be Ease Up IPA from Adnams, very nice as I recall but at 4.6% conforming to no reasonable definition of "session beer" that I'd recognise. The problem, of course, is that there isn't a hard and fast definition, but if I were asked to come up with one then "less than 4% ABV" would probably be the first (and possibly last) item on the list.

I searched my own tweets for "session" expecting a single entry, but it turns out this is a thing I'd tweeted about a couple of other times as well, including a pretty much identical stab at a definition.

though, as an aside, you don't see as much "session ale" in pubs as you used to. it's like white dog turds. in terms of rarity, not flavour.

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) August 26, 2014

Join me later as I fogeyishly bemoan the demise of the classic sub-4% "session ale". When you could drink 20 and still operate a tractor.

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 23, 2014

The point, I guess, is that this is beer that you can drink lots of while kicking back in the pub with friends and talking bollocks for a number of hours without emerging at the end of this, if you will, "session" foaming at the mouth and ready to punch a policeman. So you want something refreshing and flavoursome but reasonably light on the alcohol.

Back in the day the classic model for tied pubs was to offer three beers as standard: a lighter "session" ale, a premium "best bitter" and something a bit stronger for those that liked that sort of thing. So Fuller's have Chiswick Bitter (3.5%), London Pride and ESB, the late lamented Smiles had Brewery Bitter (probably around 3.5%), Best and Exhibition, Jennings have the standard Bitter (at 3.5%), Cumberland Ale and Sneck Lifter and even Courage had, in addition to the standard Best (blue pump-clip) and Directors (purple pump-clip) a lower-strength ale just called (I think) Courage Bitter, which had a cream/white pump-clip. I think it's the one pictured on the right here, and if this article is to be believed clocked in at a modest 3.2%, which might have been a bit watery even for a session (I don't know, because I don't think I ever tried it).

I guess part of the reason for their decline is the (partial) demise of the tied house - if you're obliged to carry beers from only one brewery then there's some value in having a selection. If on the other hand you're a free house and can source what you like from where you like, you're probably going to go with the premium product. Almost no-one who wants to carry a Fuller's ale, for instance, is going to plump for Chiswick Bitter over the mega-selling London Pride.

So I'm not trying to make this a fogeyish moan about how things were better in my day; for one thing I tend not to get to sit in pubs for long periods these days, so I tend to cash in on the more flavoursome premium product when I do get the chance. It's nice to have options, though. It's really more a moan about word usage and meanings - if "session beer" is a phrase that's ceased to have any meaning we probably ought to ditch it. If it's just being used to mean "beer you might want to drink more than one of" then just "nice beer" will probably do.

headlines of the day

The day in question being yesterday, actually, but I'm a busy man and I can't always leap into blogging action at the drop of a dangling modifier. Anyway, here's a couple from the Daily Mail.

Firstly, this one illustrating the importance of keeping track of which pronoun refers to whom - in the normal course of sentence construction the "she" and the "her" in the last clause would typically refer to the same person. Not so here, unless there's some sort of My Big Fat Scottish Zombie Wedding thing going on.

Secondly, this mind-bogglingly inconsequential piece about Victoria Beckham taking a selfie: the hack who wrote the original headline evidently gave it the care and attention its importance merited and left in two obvious errors (they seem to have now been corrected). The first one just mangles the (already lame) attempted reference to Bend It Like Beckham; the second just raises the question: what the hell is a "ballot pose"? Is it like a ballot box? i.e. something shiny, angular and sharp-cornered with a generous slot in the middle accessible by right to anyone who's on the electoral register? Well, as they say, good luck with that.

Obviously I do know it's meant to say "ballet", really. It's still not quite as funny as the claim about Stella Artois 4 being "a good pallet cleanser", though. Fascinatingly, although the link in that old 2009 blog post is now dead, the Wayback Machine has a couple of archives of it, one roughly contemporary with the post and one from a couple of years later. Here they are, in chronological order.

The sharp-eyed among you will notice that they've had a go at correcting the original error, but have, amusingly, still managed to cock it up, unless there really has been a refinement of the recipe to reposition the product from being suitable for cleaning heavy-duty wooden stacking platforms to being more suitable for cleaning artists' equipment. I assume not, and that the word they were groping unsuccessfully for each time was "palate". But it's Stella, so you never know.

headline of the day

My recollection of my drinking exploits on my own wedding day are mainly of being bought a succession of pints - mainly of the excellent Kingstone Gold which I'd specifically organised a few barrels of after a rigorous vetting and tasting process - by various people, having a couple of sips, and then putting them down somewhere in order to attend to some official duty or other or have some photographs taken, and then never picking them up again. All of which meant that I was commendably sober for all of the important stuff up to and including the first dance, although once my official duties were discharged I did get my head down and do some serious quaffing.

An approach which the young (and I do mean young - bride and groom appear to be about twelve) man here might have been well-advised to take, given the spectacle he made of himself. Still, judging by the headline, his new family didn't hold a grudge and did their best to make him feel welcomed into the family afterwards.

I am reminded of the popular (but probably apocryphal) story involving former footballer Rodney Marsh and legendary England manager Alf Ramsey, supposedly during what turned out to be the last of Marsh's nine appearances for England:

He played a mere nine times for England. There was a reason for that, too. When Alf Ramsey told him, "If you don't work harder I'll pull you off at half time," Marsh replied: "Crikey, Alf, at Manchester City all we get is an orange and a cup of tea." He was never picked again.

capital gains

As anyone who knows me will be tired of hearing by now, my daughter is utterly amazing and captivating and a joy to spend time with, not to mention being a frickin' genius. Nonetheless it is true that the freedom for Hazel and me to just take off and go away somewhere for the weekend is a bit constrained these days, partly because we just can't afford it any more, but partly because of the logistical challenges of finding somewhere to deposit the bairn.

So it was a pleasant change to be able to make a couple of trips up to London in late January and early February, one a flying visit just for a few hours and one for a couple of child-free days. The flying visit a couple of weeks ago was to pick up a new car, one of the perks of Hazel's "other" job as a distributor for Utility Warehouse. You might have seen the odd UW Mini around the place; well, distributors of a certain level of seniority are eligible to have one - not for free, but as part of a leasing package whose rates are quite good, and since we wanted to get rid of the old Focus the timing was pretty much ideal. Here's Hazel getting the official ceremonial key handover from Network Director Wayne Coupland outside UW Network HQ on the Edgware Road.

Another UW jolly a couple of weeks later, this one being the equivalent of the Paris trip last year. In theory this was supposed to be a trip to another European destination, but since Hazel's now 7 months pregnant and would have been ineligible to fly at the time of the trip we persuaded the company to give us a personal jaunt to London instead, which they kindly agreed to.

Our last proper trip to London was in June 2011, a few weeks before we got married, and we replicated part of that trip by having a jaunt on the London Eye. It was worth the repeat trip because the London skyline has been changing a bit lately, what with the appearance of the Shard, the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie.

We also took a trip to the theatre to see The Book Of Mormon, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's satirical musical. I have a bit of a problem with musicals in general, and it's a fundamental structural problem: we're meant to suspend disbelief in the usual way and engage with the drama in the non-musical bits, accepting that these are real people doing real-people stuff, but then also somehow accept that some of the principal people are going to occasionally burst into song with full orchestral/rock band (delete as applicable) backing, in a way that real people, in my experience at least, just don't tend to do. And then, worse still, drop straight back into the drama without any of the other protagonists going: erm, wait a minute, what was all that singing about just then? The more po-faced and gritty the drama (think Les Miserables, for instance) the more grating and ridiculous the effect.

So the only sort of musical that works (in my head, anyway) is one that subverts the ludicrous campery of the musical genre by being ludicrously camp and knowing throughout, not just in the musical bits. In other words, what I suppose I'm saying is that it's really only comedy that works in musicals, but, paradoxically, it only works because it's got a long history of serious drama being delivered in the same format to satirise. Book Of Mormon certainly delivers on the comedy front, as well as delivering, as you'd expect, some general mockery of religion in general and Mormonism in particular. Basically if you liked the South Park movie, which was, despite all the Saddam-Hussein-bumming-Satan stuff, itself basically a musical, you'll like this.

Just as an aside, there's an argument that Mormonism is just Scientology plus nearly 200 years of normalising, the underlying space-based nonsense being very nearly as wacky as Scientology. It's just gained a thin veneer of respectability because the loony that made the whole thing up in his head died in 1844, not 1986.

Anyway, back to London: we had originally intended to go and have a look round the Natural History Museum, but as you might (in hindsight) have expected on a rather wet Saturday afternoon there was a queue a gazillion miles long and an apparent wait time of about an hour and a half, so we decided to go to the pub instead and have a rethink. What we ended up doing was going to the much more sparsely attended Hunterian Museum just round the corner from Holborn tube station in Lincoln's Inn Fields (the largest public square in London: FACT) - the "secret London" article we looked up on the internet that recommended this described it as "The Museum Of Body Parts", which is a bit lurid, but, as it turns out, pretty accurate. As long as you aren't squeamish about seeing cocks in jars then this is a fascinating place.

Things I have seen in jars today: a rabbit's vagina, a horse's nipple, several foetuses, and the diseased rectum of the Bishop of Durham.
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 31, 2015

That's the FORMER Bishop of Durham, obviously.
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 31, 2015

One of the most celebrated exhibits is of the startling skeleton of the Irish giant Charles Byrne, whose corpse John Hunter allegedly acquired in slightly dubious circumstances and then boiled the flesh off. No word on what he did with the resulting meaty soup, but, you know, it would have been a shame to waste it. A loosely fictionalised version of Byrne features in Hilary Mantel's 1998 novel The Giant, O'Brien.

After a hilarious failure of research resulted in our attempting to visit Borough Market on the Sunday only to find it's closed on Sundays, we instead did some rather more touristy stuff, including walking across Tower Bridge, which I don't think I'd done before. We also passed the Monument, which I was unable to resist the temptation to climb (311 steps!) to the top of, just so I could say I'd done it.

One of the great joys of London is just wandering around and occasionally nipping off down a side-street and encountering an interesting pub or restaurant. Here's a couple we popped into:

• Shaws Booksellers, just round the corner from St. Paul's Cathedral. Nice little pub, draught London Pride, bish bosh, sorted. It turns out it's also just round the corner from the London HQ of the Church of Scientology.
• The Hoop & Toy, round the back of South Kensington tube station. This is the pub we adjourned to after the abortive attempt to get into the Natural History Museum. London Pride again. 
• Beirut Express just a couple of minutes away down Old Brompton Road, where we went for a Lebanese lunch. Nice lamb-y bread-y things, free olives, vast bowl of houmous. 
• Cabana just a few minutes from Tottenham Court Road tube station. Great Brazilian grub including possibly the rarest steak I've ever eaten. Not quite as epic, I'd have to say, as the Brazilian food we had at Bem Brasil when we were up in Liverpool back in July (and which I seem to have forgotten to mention at the time), but pretty good. 
• We did attempt a nostalgic re-visit to Ye Olde Mitre in Holborn after visiting the Hunterian Museum, just to sluice away the memory of the Bishop of Durham's diseased rectum, but unfortunately (and slightly bizarrely) it's closed at weekends.

that's the storify of my life

Here's the brief post-Swanage round-up. A bit of a mixed bag this year in terms of weather, but to be fair both the golf games were conducted in the dry (in the sunshine, even, on Saturday) and it was really only on Sunday that we got properly rained on.

If I were to fill in the last line in the big table I included in the previous post, it would look something like this:

Year	Dates	Transport and Pubs	General Notes
2014	10-13 Oct	Andy's Landy The Crow's Nest The Bull and Boat The Square and Compass The King's Head	In-car Stella pouches. High five! Harry wins the golf?! Corben! Corben? Wet and windy walk to Worth. Y-shaped dog turds. Pumpkins. Chickens. The tiny island of Estonia. The world's worst game of darts. Continue along Cockrod for 1.3 miles.

Photos can be found here. As promised we did also live-tweet a bit of pub-crawl action on the Saturday, and various other inconsequential stuff at other times. Twitter's hashtag-viewing facility obviously has some weird algorithm in it that excludes tweets (even from the "All" view) based on some impenetrable set of criteria, so only a small handful of the full set of tweets are now available via the standard hashtag link.

This simply will not do, so what I've done instead is use Storify to create a (hopefully) permanent record of our inane witterings and drunken blurry gurnings; have a look at this. It's ordered with the most recent tweets first, so drop down to the bottom and work up if you want them in chronological order. [STOP PRESS: I found the button that orders them the other way, so you shouldn't need to do this now.] It is also alleged that one can embed the Storify timeline in a web page, so let's have a go:

making plans for nigel

I have a confession to make, and it's a slightly shameful one. Here it is: there is one thing about Nigel Farage that I find admirable. Phew: there, I've said it. It's good to get these things off your chest.

I'll tell you what it is, if you like. There is a long and generally excruciatingly embarrassing history of politicians doing photo-opportunities in pubs, and on these occasions, pretty much without exception, they try to bolster their down-to-earth, man-of-the-people credentials by supping on a pint. It's almost without exception a pint of ale, as befits someone committed to great British traditions, and pretty much without exception you can almost hear the slight wincing gagging noises being made as Joe Politician raises the glass to his lips and has a tentative sip. That's George Osborne there on the right in a particularly fine example.

I honestly don't know why people do this, as the public know that the political classes in general are from a social stratum that would much prefer a nice gin and tonic or a glass of a nicely chambreed Chateau Lafite Rothschild to something as proletarian as a pint. But, like the furious tonguing of the wife after the conference speech, it's a tradition that no-one wants to be the first to try and shake off.

So it's quite refreshing to see that when Nigel does a photo-op holding a pint and grinning (and most of Nigel's photo-ops involve him holding a pint and grinning) it's because he really fancies a pint. And when he's drunk it, he might very possibly go and get another one. I should make honourable mention of Barack Obama here, too, who when presented with a pint of Guinness on a trip to Ireland, downed it with obvious relish.

Note that none of this absolves Nigel Farage of being a colossal gurning nitwit and an unpleasant right-wing opportunist, just to be clear. Nor should this post be taken as an endorsement of drinking during working hours, however much Farage and Boris Johnson (and William Hague back in the day) might think it's a terrific idea.

tweet fanny adams

Just a very quick one to say: if you happen to want to keep up with the 2014 Swanage activities in real time then your best bet is to do one of the following:

• keep an eye on the live webcam at the Bull and Boat - if we adhere roughly to last year's schedule we'll be there about 5pm on the Saturday;
• watch out for tweets with the hastag #SwanageXIII - I can't promise how much live-tweeting action there'll be, as we may be too busy necking ale and talking bollocks, but we may manage a few, no doubt of increasing profanity and incoherence as the evening wears on.

in dorset? yes, I certainly do

Next weekend sees us head off in Andy's Land Rover for the annual Swanage trip, a fixture in my social calendar for, ooh, ten years now. Or is it eleven? Or twelve? One of the problems with remembering the history of this sort of thing is that recollections tend to be hazy, for obvious reasons.

For instance: it was the generally received wisdom that the first year we did a "proper" Swanage trip was 2003, when we actually did two, in May and November, to coincide with the release of the second and third Matrix movies. However, evidence (i.e. some photos) recently unearthed from the depths of Andy's laptop reveals that in fact we (Andy, me, Robin and Harry) did a trip in October 2002. This is simultaneously fascinating, because we all look about twelve in the photos, and troubling, because it means that our proclaiming of the 2012 trip as Swanage X was incorrect, as it was actually Swanage XI. I suppose we can just do a bit of Stalinist revision of history and say that the 2012 trip marked the tenth anniversary of the first trip, and that therefore it was, in a very real sense, Swanage X. Whatever, I'm not going and changing all the photo captions now.

So it seemed like a good idea to capture some historical info before our descent into senility and incontinence is complete, probably any day now. The first thing I've done is to upload all the historical photos I've got, all the way back to 2002. Click on the year in the table below to go to the relevant photo gallery.

The Saturday pub crawl has evolved slightly over the years, so this list from 2007 is now slightly out of date. The canonical town centre pub list now reads as follows:

• East (formerly The Peverill)
• Bar Seven
• The White Horse
• The Purbeck (until 2009, now closed, but still the venue for a salutatory slug from the hip-flask)
• The Ship
• The White Swan
• The Anchor
• The Red Lion
• The Black Swan

Rather than list all those every time I've just noted where the crawl differed from that list in a way that any of us can remember, or if we visited any other notable pubs on our Sunday walk. The columns are hopefully self-explanatory; some of the cryptic notes in the "General Notes" column can be illuminated by clicking on the links (usually to a relevant photo), some are probably best left slightly mysterious. I've included the 2005 trip to Llangennith as a sort of honorary Swanage as it filled the same slot in the calendar and followed pretty much the same format.

As for attendees, Andy, Robin and I have a perfect 100% attendance record so far, Phil made his solitary appearance in May 2003, Richard joined us for the Llangennith trip in 2005 and has attended every one since, and Harry started in a blaze of glory attending the first three trips and then took a breather for just the nine years before rejoining us in 2012 and 2013 (and 2014, all being well).

Year	Dates	Transport and Pubs	General Notes
2002	18-21 Oct	Andy's Saab	Swanage 0! Andy's Mum's static caravan. Cheese racing. Port.
2003	23-26 May	Andy's Saab The Vista Bar	Phil! Matrix Reloaded. Rhythm Sticks. Table tennis in the Vista Bar. Phil’s Famous Backwards Golf Shot. Snow Flaps. Police layby interview with Carling tinnies. Phil being banned from Swanage forever.
2003	7-10 Nov	Andy's Saab The Vista Bar	Last trip to the caravan. Grappa and blue Aftershock. Matrix Revolutions. Harry asleep in the Red Lion. Table tennis and bowling in the Vista Bar aborted due to child invasion. Harry's wrist exerciser. Harry's "special interest" videos (aka wrist exercisers).
2004	3-6 Sep	Andy's Saab	Camping! Sunny weather. Train trip to Corfe. Russian porn model. Banged shins. Vomiting. Wurzels.
2005	14-17 Oct	Andy’s Scooby The Worm's Head The King's Head	Llangennith! i.e. not actually Swanage at all. Richard's first trip. Overloaded Scooby. Cats (small, far away). Quaver Dog. Barmaids. Angry snake. Herbal interruptions. Fireworks. Splintered/splinted tent poles.
2006	22-25 Sep	Andy’s Scooby The Mowlem	Seafront wave chicken. Lighthouse walk. Farty Globe. Ryder Cup climax.
2007	5-8 Oct	Andy’s Scooby Square and Compass The King's Arms Royal Oak	Blues Festival! Power cut. Caving. Fishing at Winspit. Fish supper. The Matraverses. The legendary 23lb carp. Stan being gutted. Weird starey kid in The Royal Oak. Pumpkins. Loganberry beer.
2008	19-22 Sep	Dave’s Mum’s Scooby Square and Compass Scott Arms	Richard's hole-in-one. More fish. No buses to Scott Arms. Taxi to Scott Arms. Chapman's Pool. Ryder Cup again.
2009	11-14 Sep	Andy’s Landy The Ship The (Studland) Bankes Arms The Village Inn The Crow's Nest	First trip in the Land Rover. Camo hats. Folk festival! Morris dancers. Bender in a Bun. Kyle. Kyle's Mom. Sandbanks. Bus on a boat. Nudists! Last of the (late) summer Purbecks. Will Killeen and his mum. Crazy Clogging Care in the Community Crystal Carl. Or was it Chris?
2010	15-18 Oct	Andy’s Landy The Greyhound The (Corfe) Bankes Arms	Green Bastards. Vote For Yourself! Train to Corfe. Demise of the Purbeck. Hypnocat. Appletise? Appletiser? Burning the fencepost.
2011	16-19 Sep	Andy’s Landy Various Wareham pubs The Square and Compass	Decaf coffee!? Orange women. Bus to Wareham. Pigs! Supermodels in the Old Granary. Pickle the dog. Barbecuing Andy's pants. Beaver Maintenance.
2012	29 Sep - 1 Oct	Andy’s Landy The Greyhound The (Corfe) Bankes Arms	Return of the Harry! Swanage X (or so we thought at the time). Ridge walk to Corfe. Exploding Party Grill. Ryder Cup smartphone updates.
2013	11-14 Oct	Andy’s Landy The Crow's Nest The Bull and Boat	Do Not Touch This Window. The Bull and Boat webcam. Very wet walk via Peverill Point.
2014	10-13 Oct	Andy’s Landy	Who knows?

bar stewards

You might remember my adventures in the loft a while back, and the ancient yellowed newspaper fragments I retrieved, which included (among other things) a list of Newport pubs, most now sadly defunct or, at best, turned into trendy wine bars, not that Newport is generally a trendy wine bar sort of city.

Well, here's another much larger list of South Wales pubs which are now closed - I think the idea is that the closures are all relatively recent, i.e. within the lifetime of the average reader. Anyway, of the 84 on the list I count ten in Newport, as it happens several of which are within a stone's throw of our current or previous homes.

• The King's Arms in Caerleon is a bit more than a stone's throw away, but I start with this one as it's the only one of the ten I've actually set foot in, not while it was the King's Arms but following its transformation into Spice Corner, a quite decent Indian restaurant. If you look closely at the sign you'll see they do retain the subtitle "at the King's Arms" just in case of any confusion. 
• The Black Horse on Somerton Road is still standing according to Google Maps, though I can't say I'd ever noticed it was there, even though I drive past it several times a week. Local residents' protests apparently saw off Tesco who wanted to turn it into a store, but that didn't save the pub which is due to be demolished any day now. 
• The King was a very impressive building just a bit further down Somerton Road - I say "was" because some time in the last few months it transformed itself into a big pile of rubble. As recently as May 2013 it had changed hands with much talk of redeveloping it, but no, they just knocked it down.
• The old Corporation Hotel on the corner of Cromwell Road and Corporation Road is being converted into flats, following an only very slightly suspicious fire just after the new owners took it over. 
• The Oddfellows & Foresters in Baneswell was definitely still a going concern when we lived just round the corner in York Place, though I don't think we ever went in; this list reckons it closed around 2011 (we moved the year before).

This list from 2009, containing 40-odd closed Newport pubs, paints a fairly grim picture. It should be said that some places do buck the trend from time to time, though - that list contains The Gladiator in Malpas, just the other side of the M4, for instance, and it's still derelict in StreetView as of today (though the magic time-travel facility suggests it was open in 2008), but in fact it seems to have now re-opened as the Usk Vale, a slightly more upmarket operation by the sound of it. Good luck to them, I say.

If you do find yourself stuck in the centre of Newport and you need a pint, then the best thing I can suggest is that you either get yourself over to Ye Olde Murenger House or take a short walk to Stow Hill and either the Pen & Wig or the Red Lion, any of which should provide you with a) a reasonably decent pint and b) a better than 50/50 chance of making it out alive. In central Newport that's about the best you're going to get.

scouse of the driving fun

Since my lovely wife managed to snag some tickets for the final day of the Open Championship as an unexpected but very welcome birthday present earlier this year, we found ourselves off to Liverpool last weekend, which as it happens is a city I'd never been to before. That being the case we decided to make a weekend of it and spend Saturday doing some touristy stuff before heading off to Royal Liverpool on the Sunday morning.

So, as you can imagine, this involved stuff like having a look at the Cavern Club, the Liver Building, taking a ferry 'cross the Mersey and all that sort of stuff. That will no doubt be tediously familiar to you, so here's a couple of slightly more tangential facts about the local area:

• While the Mersey between Liverpool and Birkenhead is criss-crossed with a couple of road tunnels and a railway tunnel, you have to go a surprising distance inland before you encounter a bridge, or more accurately a pair of bridges, spanning the narrow bit of river between Runcorn and Widnes, as well as the Manchester Ship Canal which runs alongside the river at this point. So far so meh, you might say, but until 1961 there was another bridge on this site, known as the Widnes-Runcorn Transporter Bridge. Now you'll be aware that in Newport we have one of only two working transporter bridges in the UK, and the one that makes a claim to be the largest operational one in the world, although the one in Middlesbrough makes similar claims - it all depends which measurements you're talking about. Anyway, the Widnes-Runcorn one was older and bigger than either of the remaining ones, but was crushed by the ruthless utilitarian jackboot of progress, mostly because as fascinating as transporter bridges are, it is an extraordinarily slow and inefficient way of getting traffic across a river, which would be why they never really caught on. The stubs of the approach roads and some of the buildings remain, everything else has gone.
• Needless to say there are a gazillion establishments named after Beatles songs or other Beatles-related stuff. On just the walk through central Liverpool on Saturday I spotted establishments called Imagine, Rubber Soul, Glass Onion and Eleanor Rigby. No doubt the whole city is riddled with them.
• We did a quick on-foot tour of the city's two cathedrals - as striking as Paddy's Wigwam is it's Giles Gilbert Scott's monumental Anglican cathedral that really catches the eye. As with the bridges it really depends which measurement(s) you choose to use, but by some measurements this is the largest Anglican church in Europe. It's certainly pretty impressive (and huge) close up, anyway.
• The stripy knitted tree-warmers we found on Park Lane on our way to the Anglican cathedral were apparently put there as part of the Liverpool International Street Art Festival. This activity is known as "yarn bombing". As things with the word "bombing" in them go, this is one of the nicer ones.
• While walking from one cathedral to the other we came over all thirsty so we stopped for a pint in the amusingly-named Ye Cracke on Rice Street, which didn't look like much from the outside but turned out to be a little murky spit-and-sawdust gem complete with the inevitable "John Lennon once drank here" claims but also (more importantly) a very delicious and refreshing pint of Hopsack from the Phoenix Brewery in nearby Manchester. 

On to the golf. Luckily we had a beautiful sunny day to walk the course, so we made the most of it by arriving fairly early (about 9am) via the excellent Wirral Line rail link which deposits you at Hoylake station no more than 10 minutes walk from the course entrance. Having availed ourselves of a coffee and bacon bap combo from the tented village we set out onto the course. Fortified by that, as well as the lunch we'd taken with us and a couple of pints of Stella from the on-course bars we managed to get round a good number of the holes and park ourselves in a couple of good spots where we could a) get a good view and b) try to get on television. Our best chance of that was probably on the fourth green, where members of the last two groups (Dustin Johnson and Rickie Fowler) chipped back onto the green from right under our noses, on the ninth where we found a good spot to recline with a pint and a sandwich and on the twelfth where none other than Tiger Woods hoicked his second shot wildly into the crowd only about ten yards from where we were standing. I keep meaning to watch back some of the coverage on the BBC iPlayer and see if I can spot us, but I haven't yet and I suspect I never will.

Unlike at the PGA Championship at Wentworth there isn't really any standing room around the 18th green, so you have to make a decision early on whether you're going to try and see as much golf as possible out on the course and then take your chances later, or try and bag a seat in the stands 3 or 4 hours before the leading groups come through and just stay there for the rest of the day. We didn't fancy this second option very much, so we watched the last couple of holes from the bar area in the tented village, on our way there nearly getting run over by a golf cart carrying none other than Samuel L Monkeyfighting Jackson to some VIP viewing area or other.

Speaking of the PGA Championship, I believe I'm right in saying that, slightly surprisingly, Rory McIlroy is the first man to win it and the Open in the same year, just as Martin Kaymer was the first to win the Players Championship and the US Open in the same year a month or so ago.

Anyway, photos (the golf ones being mostly grainy mobile phone camera shots as technically photography is prohibited on championship days) can be found here.

unrhyw un awydd peint?

Here's an interesting article listing 75 great Welsh pubs. Inevitably this prompts a bit of trainspottery box-ticking in the mind of someone who has, well, that sort of mind, so my sub-list (i.e. the ones I've been to) comprises the following numbers:

1, 8, 17, 31, 34, 37, 38, 41, 43, 44, 51, 52, 53, 58, 67, 75

- so that's 16 out of 75, which, while clearly leaving some scope for improvement, isn't too bad. Just to pick out a few notable ones:

• the Plough and Harrow in Monknash (#1) is just down the road from where our friend Kate used to live, and also not far from St. Bride's Major, former home of Charlotte Church and Gavin Henson. The one occasion I've ever been in the pub provided the slightly surreal situation of competing for the barmaid's attention with Gavin Henson - commendably she stuck to strictly orthodox bar protocol and served me first, since I'd got to the bar first. I can confirm that he is a) quite tall, b) quite orange and c) wears mirrored aviator sunglasses indoors, even in quite dingy pubs. Make of that what you will.
• we went to the Sun Inn in Llangollen (#8) on our canal-boating trip in 2000 as referenced here, before doing a bit of highly irregular permit-free overnight mooring here.
• I maintain that, while it's perfectly OK, you probably wouldn't give the Worm's Head Hotel (#31) a second glance if it weren't for the fact that its beer garden offers one of the most spectacular views in Britain, at least among views available from beer gardens anyway.
• the Bear in Crickhowell (#34) was the venue for a post-walk pint after Huw and I went up Table Mountain a few months back.
• the Ancient Briton in Pen-y-cae (#38) was the venue for a very similar post-walk pint after Hazel and I had been up the Black Mountain in the snow back in April 2010.
• I had a pint in the Ship Inn on the shores of Red Wharf Bay in Anglesey (#44) while my ex-girlfriend Anne and I were over there in the summer of 2000. 
• the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel at the foot of the Llanberis Pass in Snowdonia (#51) was previously mentioned in another pub-related list here.
• we went to the Sloop in Porthgain (#52) for lunch (and a pint) on our trip to Pembrokeshire in June 2012. 
• the Murenger House (#58) remains comfortably the best pub in central Newport, not that that is much of an accolade. It's a nice little place only marred by its being tied to Sam Smith's brewery and therefore obliged to serve their rather uninspiring beer.
• the King's Head in Llangennith (#67) has been the venue for much beery hilarity over the years, usually while we've been staying at the Hillend campsite down the road.
• we went to the Blue Anchor at East Aberthaw (#75) with Jenny and Jim after we'd taken Nia for her first visit to the beach at Barry Island.

A couple of near misses - we parked up in the car park behind Tafarn Sinc (#6) in Pembrokeshire before bagging Foel Cwmcerwyn back in 2009, without ever quite realising that it was there, otherwise we'd have gone in. I also parked round the back of the Cwmdu Inn (#2) when I did my Royal Wedding avoidance walk back in 2011. It is also quite possible that I've been in more of these (particularly the ones in Cardiff) without specifically remembering their names.

No review of a list of this sort is complete without a bit of quibbling, so I'll just add that I'd have included the Old Arcade in central Cardiff as I think they have the best Brains SA anywhere, and I also have a soft spot for the Albany just up the road from Hazel's old flat in Roath. And familial loyalty obliges me to bemoan the absence of the Lewis Arms in Tongwynlais. If you play the video below the pub list you'll notice that the beardy bloke saying nothing very interesting is drinking a pint of Wye Valley HPA in the Bell in Caerleon, which I've been to a couple of times and would also probably be on my list. It was also the venue for another slightly underwhelming celebrity encounter, this time with big-nosed shouty snooker bloke Rob Walker who seemed to be in the middle of a "10 Miles 10 Pints" fun run/pub crawl mashup at the time, judging by his and his companions' attire.

when in abergavenny do as the abergavennians do

I took my father out for a post-Christmas walk earlier today to clear a bit of the tryptophan and saturated fat from the artery walls. Nothing especially interesting in that, I suppose, nor indeed in our choice of walk, which was to tackle the far from awesome challenge of the Little Skirrid aka Ysgyryd Fach, conveniently situated within walking distance of Mum & Dad's new(ish) house, just the other side of the railway station and the A465. A round trip of around three and a half miles, and an ascent to the dizzying height of around 270 metres (886 feet), but quite a nice walk, if a little soggy and slippery underfoot.

Apparently the Little Skirrid and its more interesting big brother Ysgyryd Fawr (generally just referred to as "the Skirrid") a couple of miles up the road are two of the hills known collectively as the Seven Hills of Abergavenny. The others are the two best-known Abergavenny hills, Blorenge and Sugar Loaf, and the three minor hills Deri, Rholben and Mynydd Llanwenarth, all of which are really just outlying ridges on the south side of the Sugar Loaf without obvious "summits". Those given to occasional attacks of cynicism might conclude that the last few were added out of desperation just to get the number up to the magical seven (i.e. the same number as Rome). Further half-hearted lazy internet research reveals that this is a fairly common claim made on behalf of a whole host of places.

Anyway, here's the GPS track log and altitude profile, for what it's worth - the round trip took us just under two hours, but in slightly less treacherous underfoot conditions you could probably knock half an hour or so off that.

Our intention had been to pop into the Great Western by the railway station for a cheeky pint on the way back, but it was shut, unfortunately. The one Abergavenny pub recommendation I can give you is that the Hen & Chickens in the centre of town is excellent.