There are three pubs in Jamestown, but The Standard is the only one that seems to be reliably open. This was my penultimate full day in St Helena and while, in some ways, I am looking forward to getting back home, I see Paranoia has broken out again in a big way…
Friday night — and I’m out! In every sense of the term. So were plenty of other people who were on the flight, ten days ago. The Muleyard pub in Jamestown hosted ex-pats and locals alike, and we all celebrated being part of the land of the living.
As this blog cycles (seemingly endlessly) around the calendar there are certain fixed points, and 26th October is one of them — Clare’s birthday. Here she is celebrating it with lunch in the White Lion — her parents, my in-laws, unseen to the left. Happy happies to her: I shall demur from reporting the exact number, but it’s several years fewer than me, anyway.
These two certainly look like they’re having a jolly time on their respective Saturday lunchtimes in Hebden Bridge. But perhaps they just feel about Halloween much the same as I do — it’s intrusive and over-the-top, and we could probably do without it.
Do I spend too much time in bars and cafés? Maybe it’s whatever Mediterranean genes I have in me. I was working, honest. This is a photowhack — the only picture I took today.
I didn’t plan it this way but this is turning into a very uneventful week, spent mostly at home. It’s lockdown all over again, except the pubs are open. Including this secluded little spot at the back of the Railway, unoccupied at this point in time.
Work, at the moment, consists of me banging my head against various Kafkaesque brick walls (Covid has infected the bureaucratic mindset far more profoundly than it has our physiology, and to more danaging effect) until I can’t stand it any more on any given day and need a drink. Today that point was reached about 3.50pm. Ten minutes later I was admiring the woodiness, almost meatiness, of the table in Nightjar at which I drank my first pint of the day.
A day out at the football, and it was Clare’s idea. She sits there looking rather amused at the boisterous but harmless fellow Morecambe FC fans who took over The Leopard pub near Doncaster station at lunchtime. The stencil of Pelé, to the right, also sets the tone. Sadly, no one was feeling as boisterous after watching a rather tame 1-0 defeat, but that was all still to come.
They start serving early at the Old Gate pub/restaurant in town. The condiments are set and prepared even before 10am. Off they stretch into the distance, like little table-set skyscrapers.
Witnessed in the Miners’ Arms, Garforth, near Leeds, this lunchtime. They did eventually arrive in person to consume their lunches; which if they were as good as ours were, were worth the wait (mild, unsolicited advertising).
And so ends July 2021, a month of refreshing normality, and the last complete calendar month before this blog reaches the end of its tenth year, on 25th August.
Being 42 