What have I missed while I’ve been away? Little things, the family, my DVD collection, pubs. Whitelock’s has in the past won ‘Best City Pub in Britain’ awards and is this great little oasis in the middle of Leeds’ shopping district. Plenty of reference is made within to its foundation date of 1715 AD: fifty-five years before any Europeans properly set foot in the country I have just left.
What have I not missed while I’ve been away? The weather…
I have seen a few real koalas: most in captivity, including at the Lone Pine zoo here in Brisbane (where I also saw the cassowary); the only one I have seen in the wild was spotted on Kangaroo Island. This toy looks far more awake and alert than most of the real ones do, they are such dozy beasts. Maybe it’s the beer, or the frigid pipe on which he’s sat.
Taija (pronounce it to more-or-less rhyme with ‘higher’) is from Oakland, California, and has been staying at the Kookaburra Inn these last few days. I took this while we hung out this morning, with her on her way to the airport and eventually somewhere else in this, the sixth-largest country in the world. Like a lot of people I have met on this trip, we were only acquainted a short time, but I think this shot captures her quite well – or more accurately, my image of her.
I was working (teaching online) until nearly 10.45pm today so it was rather late once I got to the pub, and with it being St Patrick’s Day, it was like, come into the party late but sober, or just go home and ignore it all. I went in for a drink. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I started talking to someone only to later have her friends basically tell me to piss off, for no reason other than they were wankers. So much for the legendary hospitality of denizens of the Emerald Isle. But Brighton beat Crystal Palace 3-0, which restored my faith in the rightness of the universe.
Why this shot? Because it’s green, because it amuses me that the cardboard leprechaun behind the customer has collapsed in a state of drunkenness, because I worked for 13 hours today (on a Sunday!) and didn’t get much chance to take much else, and because this now takes the record for the latest shot yet in any given day.
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.
Being 42 