Oh dear, I’m in a pub again, and at lunchtime too. However, the Tite & Locke bar is newly opened, on platform 3 of Lancaster station, a place I pass through reasonably often, and usually with Clare, who is not averse herself to the occasional beer. I think I will be coming back here: it certainly made a good first impression (unpaid advertisement).
I continue to munch air miles in 2024, as I have returned to Toronto for a couple of weeks’ work. On my first afternoon I was wondering what picture I should get to best represent the city where I’ve already spent 17 days of my life. The CN Tower, or other big, tall buildings? Another of the fine collection of murals? But in the end, let’s go with a pub, as there are some fine drinking holes to be found here — including the Imperial pub downtown, as pure a 1970s relic of interior design as I have ever seen. It still has working aquaria, for heaven’s sake. I saw the girl’s reflection in the mirrored pillar and tried it.
London can pretty much provide access to all world cuisines, and in fact, Walthamstow on its own manages quite well. This Japanese ramen bar certainly hit the spot for my evening meal. There are a lot of brands of sake, aren’t there — I wonder if any of them taste any different from one another? It’s not a drink that seems to internalise a great deal of variety.
Most of these bottles have been sitting on a shelf above our kitchen door since about three days after we moved in, in 2001. They looked good at the time and they’ve just never moved since. The limoncello bottle was added after we went to Rome in 2014, but I think that’s the only change. And yes, our plaster is artfully decaying.
I was going to post something about how the truly large cave spiders that once lived in our shed (see here, for instance) haven’t made an appearance for a while. Then this morning — the day after this picture was taken — a “spider the size of a Buick” (to quote Woody Allen) turned up in the bathtub. This one’s big enough however. And I needed those bottles to decant the plum wine….
The underbelly of the Mancunian Way isn’t the most glamorous spot in the city, but somehow this combination of graffiti and beer bottles looks relaxing.
If anyone in the UK has any better ideas for what to do with this Friday evening I’d love to hear them. Have a good weekend y’all.
I am sat in my hotel room in Tokyo as I type this, but there can be no photos of Japan for this day as I didn’t touch Asian soil until Tuesday morning. This is Helsinki, which a few years ago had several shots on this blog in its own right but since then has become another one of those places (Copenhagen, Schiphol, Istanbul….) seen as an airport transfer but not otherwise ‘real’. How does it compare? Well, it has a decent amount of booze in it as you can see. And there was sunshine, which was certainly more than there was in Manchester on departure, or indeed on Tokyo on arrival, both teeming with rain.
Being 42 