Tony pays the boss his dues. OK, so it’s early to be in the pub but plenty of people were; starved of true human contact for so long, there is a great deal of lost time to be made up between friends.
To stop the walls closing in any more than they already are I’ve been making a point of sitting out in a spot by the river in the early evenings, when the weather allows. Just to take some air, watch the ducks (my post of a few days ago was taken from this same point), have a couple of beers. Feel human. Clare joined me for this one and so, for 15 minutes or so, did fellow ex-Railway habitué Bernard, who happened to be passing with a bottle of his own. We talked. As much as anything, we just enjoyed the fact we could see someone else’s face, for real.
I have been thinking about this, and have decided to declare this the one and only positive outcome of lockdown –‘this’ being the emergence of a UK pavement café culture. We don’t necessarily have the weather for it, but hey, pubs and restaurants can invest in some umbrellas, as they do elsewhere. On sunny afternoons like this one, it doesn’t matter, and we can give it a shot.
Now the pubs have reopened, dogs are once again obliged to spend their Sundays wondering why their owners are not letting them just clamber over everyone else in the beer garden. This one has given up on it all, and decided just to keep a close eye on the piece of litter: before it dozed off, anyway.
It has been 105 days (March 21st) since I was last in a pub, and 6 more since the last time one featured on here.
But they’re back open. So a pint was duly raised in the Bay Horse, Oxenhope, Yorkshire, to celebrate this fact. And celebration it was: anyone about to come back with messages of doom and gloom in response, please don’t.
Except for the guys on the screen last Sunday, people have been absent from the blog for many days now, so let’s rectify that today to make us remember that humanity has not yet quite given up the ghost. Would this have been better, or worse, had the weather been poor? I suspect worse. At least this guy’s approach to boosting his vitamin D levels — the chair, the can of Carlsberg — is still available to us.
The weather over the last few days has been changeable to say the least, and another drenching on the way back to Victoria was avoided by taking shelter in this large tent that has taken up residency nearby. That it lived up to the promise of the sign was just a bonus. Well, it is the weekend.
Four days in a row in Manchester and as I’m there tomorrow as well for non-work reasons, this may well become only it’s second five-in-a-row stint on the blog.
I’ve always been prepared to state that the Belgians do the world’s finest beer. And it’s very nice to finally come to their country and test this out for real. Has my mind changed? Not in the least.
The departure lounge is a kind of limbo state. You’ve sort of left the country, the real world, behind, but you’re not yet at your final destination or even properly travelling yet. Time stops behaving as it does out there. A beer at 8.20 on a Sunday morning is quite tolerated. But there’s nothing really to do: the system may as well suck some more money out of you while you wait. I would like to see libraries, cinemas and gyms in departure lounges. But I doubt it’ll ever happen.
There are many fine things about Australia. The beer is not one of them. Pile it high and pump it out is the usual approach, and if you find something more delicately crafted, I bet it’s come from somewhere else (probably New Zealand). Ah well. You can’t have everything in a country.
Being 42 