Officially so. As voted in, in 2012, by the people whose opinion counts in this regard. And a damn fine pub it is too – the Sprig and Fern on Milton Street, in Nelson, at the top end of South Island. The sign to the right is worth reading.
This is Debs who is a regular of the Railway (you’ve seen it often enough) – she has been here for a while visiting family and we both happened to be in Brisbane tonight, so shared a couple of Guinnesses (there they are) at the Irish pub with its cool balcony on the corner of George and Elizabeth Streets. Sláinte!
Blackburn, Lancashire (as in ‘4,000 holes in…’). Why am I here? Because we were supposed to be going to see Blackburn Rovers v Brighton & Hove Albion, but there was some rain and the match was postponed because of a ‘waterlogged pitch’. Despite the fact that their considerably less-well-off neighbours at Accrington Stanley, five miles away, managed to play their game, as did every other club in the Championship today. We’d not come from that far away and were then going to my nearby parents anyway (see tomorrow’s picture), but some Brighton fans had set off from the south coast at 4am; the match was not postponed until 1.30pm. Bad show, Blackburn Rovers FC.
So here’s a picture of a side of a table in the Postal Order pub instead. I quite like the gaudy textures and patterns but at the same time muted colours, set off by that little semicircle of pink.
Things in Hebden Bridge are largely all recovered now after the floods of June and July; most establishments are back open again. This includes the Railway, my local pub, last seen on the blog on 22nd July when we got together there to have what might have been a final drink-up and tried to coordinate our plans to keep it open. Well, for now, it is still open, in independent ownership and not quite the same as it was, but near enough. Happy Fridays.
Was here for the football, Huddersfield Town v Brighton – the mighty (well, reasonably so) Seagulls winning 2-1. Did not get a decent photo of the game, but this rather over-the-top piece of pub decor did grab the attention earlier on.
It’s day 450 of the blog today, so I have updated the Best of the Rest page with some more good shots that didn’t quite make the one-a-day cut.
You know this game? You have to create loops of one colour or the other to win? Well, never mind. It passed the time during the usual Sunday afternoon in the pub.
Incidentally, a numerological curiosity. Day 444 of this blog falls on 11/11, and as of today I have 111 followers. This doesn’t mean anything, it just appeals to a certain sense of neatness.
All bars are kind of different, aren’t they? Like people’s houses, different arrangements of basically the same ingredients but it all comes through into something original. The people who want to take all enjoyment out of drinking alcohol would rather there were no ‘public houses’ like this and we all just drank stuff bought in the supermarket, at home. Well, sod that. Where there’s life there will be pubs. Hell, we might even get the Railway back some day.
Here is not the place for the fine detail, but the ‘significant’ news that hit on my first day in Tuscaloosa, mentioned below, was that the giant ‘pubco’ (pub ownership company) that owns the Railway has decided that it is unwilling to stump up the cost of a refurbishment following the damage caused by the floods on 22nd/23rd June and 9th July. They want to sell the pub, but no one is particularly convinced that they have an interest in keeping the pub in the hands of someone who will, well, keep it as a pub and not convert it into something else. The last few years in the UK have, to say the least, not been kind to the pub trade.
Well, we – the customers – want to keep it as a pub, so today we had a meeting there to discuss what we were going to do. It was a lovely sunny day and there was also a social aspect to it – no one wanted their last drink here to be that horrible 22nd June. But it shouldn’t have to be the last today, either. We’ll try not to make it the last.
Free wi-fi. You gotta love it. A proper working lunch.
Had planned to get a photo of a fraternity house today, this being ‘Idiosyncracy part 2’ (see yesterday) but Tuscaloosa was having a dull and rainy day and the pictures I got were not very interesting. So I stopped myself from feeling constrained by my own plans and got this different side to campus life here at the University of Alabama. Phil is not a person, incidentally – apparently it is short for ‘Philibuster’s’.
This whole line of ducks took it upon themselves to saunter up the main street of Hebden Bridge today: sort of like we used to do while at primary school, to dash through the secondary school campus now and again on the way home and feel dead hard about it. I was too slow with my camera to capture more than this one, but never mind.
Being 42 