Lower Life

Lower 15
And all of a sudden, it’s Autumn. Didn’t see that coming. Same every year, what happened to all the heat and light? I’m only just coming around to autumn. I’ve disliked it for most of my life as it’s the start of school which is the start of the anxiety from my childhood. Anxiety began for me in 1973 between the Beatles split and the Pistol’s last LP. It’s not a good season, the beginning of darkness and all that, you can keep your vibrant leaves, your mists, your mellow fruitfulness, no, spring for me please.

Well, as I say, I’m now coming around to autumn. I’m in a better place so have time to enjoy the ripe, red apples picked from my own tree and eaten in the garden in my slippers. The fall now seems a better furnished place than it was when I was young, it now seems warmer and less dreary, there’s international rugby and the food’s better.

It got so bad a few years back that I would get anxious in mid-summer just at the thought of the swifts leaving. I had to measure out the time in order to cope. The swifts went, the schools go back, half term, the clocks change, and the days get shorter. I needed to be able to get to Hallowe’en, then Bonfire Night, the aim being December 21 and the tilting of the world back toward the light. If I could get to the beginning of December I was ok, because December meant Christmas and I could legitimately have a drink every day, and I thought this helped.

Autumn wine tasting season helps enormously. I’ve been into town on and off pretty much every week recently, it’s a lot harder work than it sounds. I did three this week, Morrisons, M&S and the Co-op, I also got tied into beer and rum tastings in the evenings too. My palate is now buggered and this all came on the back of the Ryder Cup weekend so it’s all been quite hectic.

The Ryder Cup is a time where I and two very good friends meet up every two years to drink, bet and watch golf in the confines of a darkened room in Milton Keynes - and what a success we had in the betting. All very profitable and on the Friday night we went off to the casino in Northampton like dogs with two dicks - and then we cleaned up there too. The problem with the Ryder Cup in Europe is the early start, when it's in the US we can stay up late with a much later first tee time. So we were good boys and in bed before 2am with a first tee time of 7.10am. Saturday went with a few wins on the golf, some decent action with the horses in the placepots and then off home for an 11am start on Sunday. All was well until Diddy's daughter called us as we were preparing the veg for our roast dinner, to say he'd fallen off his bike and was on his way to hospital. Now he's always been a colossal wanker, so if there was to be a weakness in his armour it would be his wrist. He broke it in several places, and underwent a two and a half hour surgery so missed all of Sunday's action, the lifting of the trophy and all.

This is all catching up with me now, not as young as I used to be.

I’ll miss tasting season when it ends, I just wish I had the self-discipline to have a cup of tea on the train home, rather than a pint or two in the Head of Steam and then a bottle of Staropramen on the train. And then a bottle of wine when I get home and a hangover in the morning. In fact the hangover, as it is, is much more a mental than a physical reaction, a gut wrenching feeling of illness of ease. But there will be more booze tomorrow and this helps kick it down the road.

In the last couple of years I’ve had November off the sauce. I generally have way too much in October and December is Christmas boozing so November becomes NO-vember. Again, it’s all about self-discipline which is not my strong suit. But we’re back to the Autumn and winter darkness and my head, so it’s really got to happen to see me through to the solstice and the lengthening of the days. The light and shade of the year are so closely associated with the light and shade of my mental health, which in turn is cast into horrifying relief by excessive drinking.

There is one thing I absolutely love about winter drinking though. It’s when you go into a pub and it’s daylight and when you leave it’s dark - I find this wonderful, like worlds have changed and events taken over while I wasn’t looking. It’s like waking from a coma after many years and re-discovering the world again.

So note to self - steady as she goes as we glide into the darker times or they will become, as I know to my cost, really dark. I shall endeavour to practice restraint, get some exercise done and try to see the autumn in all its glorious colour and thank my maker that as I lift the glass to my lips I've not got a broken wrist.

Lower 14
So it’s yet another week of alcohol stories. In the past month we’ve had ‘consumption of any alcohol is dangerous’, this week’s message is that middle aged folk, and I suppose at 48 that means me, should have a couple of days a week with no booze. This to me seems perfectly reasonable advice and not a sign that the nanny state is taking over. The hoo-har around this story is that the advice comes from Public Health England in a joint problem with Drink Aware, and here’s the rub, Drink Aware are funded by the drinks industry.

So there we have it, good health advice is bad because of the people who fund it. Those Drink Aware bastards, it’s in their interest to keep their customers alive, how dare they give out good advice? Did anyone have a go at the bookies for saying ‘When the fun stops - stop’? As it happens, I am an inveterate gambler and consequently skint all the time, I am waiting for the fun to start! (We all know the fun starts later this month when the jumps season starts in earnest).

Also recently we had Adrian Chiles’ latest ‘documentary’, in his previous one he was having some issues with God and whether his imaginary friend wanted him for a sunbeam. Now it appears he thinks he's drinking too much. I have news for you Adrian, we’re all drinking too much. The good news is that there's quite a simple solution, drink less. Much more complex if you have addiction issues I’ll grant you, but for a bright person in control of your faculties, you can make the assessment and drink less or not at all if that’s the way you want to go.

And what is too much anyway? In the last year Public Health England made it more than fourteen units a week, irrespective if you’re a man or woman, it used to be fourteen for a woman and twenty-one for a man. By doing this, at a stroke, a huge number of men in the safe zone became unhealthy or problem drinkers. These are men drinking fifteen to twenty-one units, that’s eight pints a, one a day and two on Saturday or say a bottle and a half of wine per week, clearly not an unhealthy amount.

There’s also something very curious, dare I say suspicious about the measurements. By every scale as a nation we are drinking less than we used to. Young folk show the biggest drop, but older drinkers too are much more careful than previous generations. And yet, we are told, the damage caused by drinking increases year on year. This simply does not add up unless in this declining drinking population there is a growing number of extremely destructive drinkers or maybe the older drinkers’ lives are simply catching up with them - or, as I suspect, the collection of data on drink damage is ‘back of an envelope’ at best. I’m not denying that drink causes damage, clearly for some it does but arbitrary limits and sketchy stats are not helping the cause of public health.

I drank too much this week, on Wednesday I was at a tasting of Spanish cider, or sidre from Asturia if you will. Basically one glass was too much of this stuff, it was pretty appalling across the board. One or two were vaguely palatable but on the whole they were over dry, acidic and some very dirty tasting. Having travelled through Asturia I've tasted sidre out there and it was pretty good, they do this odd pouring thing into a tilted glass held as low as possible from the bottle held as high as possible. All good fun but a bit of a barrier to having a session. Trouble is it doesn’t travel well and they’ve tried to go all posh by using Champagne bottles which just sets it up to fail.

Sadly, it sounds like sales of cider, Asturian or otherwise are on the wane in the UK, pity, I think of it as the original British drink and there’s some really great stuff out there, so I think our Spanish friends, not only are they producing some really poor stuff, they are also late to the party. Drinking sidre would certainly make me want to have a number of alcohol free days a week.

LOWER LIFE 13
I’ve gone from some kind of bloody virus thing that absolutely knocked me sideways to an excruciating bad back. Back pain is a right bastard, it infects every movement, even breathing’s tough. It also seems to have thrown my right knee out which is doubly inconvenient as Wine Tasting Season started in earnest this week.

Wine tasting, as a profession is a lot harder than it sounds. It takes a lot of practice to get as good as me and it takes some skill to taste, evaluate and write legible notes on over a hundred wines in a session. A tasting day for me usually begins in the Wetherspoons a five minute walk from Milton Keynes Station. I will have a Diet Pepsi as I wait for the off-peak tickets to start. Some of my wine tasting colleagues, the glugerati, start the day with a coffee but I always find the flavour too strong when my palate has to be on top form.

I take the 10 o’clock train and am in Euston by 10.30. It’s then off to some room somewhere in the capital to sample the finest wines the British supermarkets have to offer. I only go to the supermarket tastings, the multiple retailers as they are know, this is in the main because over 85% of the wine sold in the UK is sold by them, so really why would I concentrate on anything else?

Now there is some debate among the boozeiscienti as to the correct way to approach a sizeable tasting. Some preferring to start with the reds and then do the whites, others vice versa and, despite them always being put out to taste first, none of us start with the fizz. I prefer to start with the reds but if it’s a crowded room I tend to look for wherever there’s a gap in the crowd, and begin there.

It’s always the usual crowd, a larger than normal amount of red trousers, the odd cravat, very posh women with oversized handbags, a few young pups. I like the company of Brian from The Scotsman and Simon of Woods on Wine, we pass the time amiably enough. Often these dos are run by PR agencies, lots of very posh pretty young things, many of whom don’t seem to realise that any perfume at all, ANY, is too much and it buggers up all our noses. I don’t know if you’ve ever been buggered up the nose, it’s not nice let me tell you.

On a big tasting it’s easy to get into a rhythm. Pour, sniff, sip, slurp, spit, think, write. A lot of rocking back and forth. There’s usually a lunch, these vary from, ‘can’t be bothered’, through ‘inappropriate buffet’, right up the scale to ‘Waitrose’ a full on three course with wine and cheese. The lunch at this week’s tasting was very much ‘can’t be bothered’.

This carries on until the middle of October while all the supermarkets get their Christmas stuff out. They know that, particularly with wine, if they have a bad Christmas they will have a bad year, so they have to get it right. Not all of them do and in fact many of the bigger retailers fail spectacularly, usually to do with lazy buying, lazy event management and lazy marketing. Then the season kicks off all over again in March at the start of my hayfever - it’s never easy.

So what are the trends this winter? Pinot gris seems to be the thing, people are realising that it’s just a different name for the over popular pinot grigio but when it’s called gris it’s usually got a bit more body, character and well, quality. There’s also a lot of gruner veltliner about but I find it quite dull. Fizz is all the rage still. Lots of cheap, thin prosecco, there is some good stuff about (see my website) but as with anything that gets ragingly popular there’s over-production and naturally the quality sinks. Cava is making a comeback, it also suffered from over-production but it’s scaled back and now the quality is returning. There’s a lot of fairly decent Portuguese red knocking about, Chile is always well priced, there’s some dire Argentinian Malbec and if it’s quality that you’re after I highly recommend higher level Aussies, both reds and whites aim for over twenty quid.

I will plough through the rest of the season and hope this back thing eases, it’ll probably get much worse as I do tend to gain a few pounds in this lark. Might be back to the gym next week and then I’ll really have something to moan about.

LOWER LIFE 12
It’s no fun being poorly is it? I say poorly, I’m not ill, not like some of you poor bastards out there, people with real illnesses, ailments and hardships, I’m definitely only poorly. I think I’ve got some kind of virus. I’m all lethargic, my legs are like lead, breathing is troublesome. It’s a bit like having a cold but without the snot.

This certainly isn’t cause for an appointment at the doctors. Not that you could get one for the next four weeks anyhow. My doctors is a fearsome place. The medical staff, when you can get to see one, all seem perfectly capable, it’s the admin staff there that frighten me. Surely they must know that when a person is staring at them over the reception desk that they are either ill or there on behalf of someone who’s ill. Therefore we may not be as sharp as we usually are, we might be distracted or in pain and that possibly a modicum of empathy, dare I say kindness, might be in order. Every time I go in there I get shouted at.

A couple of occasions back I went in to see the doc about my back, I had an appointment and went into the reception remembering that I must check in on the machine behind the door - however the machine was not working so I went to the desk. ‘What do you want?’, ‘I want to check in for my appointment’, ‘You need to use the machine behind the door’, ‘I tried, but the machine isn’t working’. Pause, looking me straight in the eye, ‘Name?’.

Last time around, I went in for a blood test. Hooray, the machine WAS working so I checked in and sat down to wait. I was the only person in the waiting room and then there was a aggressive shout from behind the reception desk. ‘What are you doing there, do you have an appointment?’, ‘Yes, it’s at 8.30, I’ve come for a blood test’, ‘Well you shouldn’t be sitting there,’ she barked, ‘you need to be across the car park in the health centre!’

I skulked off for my blood test, only to be called by the dreadful receptionist a week later that I needed to come in for another one as my sample hadn’t been labelled properly, but she said it in such a way as to imply that this was my fault. Perhaps this is a ploy simply to put us all off coming in the first place.

So, no, I will not be going to the doctors unless this becomes completely unbearable. In honesty, it’s getting a bit better, well it’s Friday after all, I’ve not had a drink since last Saturday and I have a rather good bottle of fino chilling in the fridge. I’m on a not drinking in the week health kick which means that I am compelled to go on a massive binge at the weekend. Since I’ve been ill I’ve not really missed it but as I say, it’s now Friday. My sleep has certainly improved and my mental health is a little better, less negative reactions, more clarity, less anxiety, better mood in general - see, who needs a bloody doctor anyway? Also, I’m off out for dinner tomorrow night for my sister’s 50^th and nephew’s 18th, and I intend to celebrate, and I will go back to abstinence and being poorly again on Sunday.

On the plus side The Green Man has re-opened. It’s had a lick of paint and there’s a new couple behind the bar who seem friendly enough. Let’s hope they can make a go of it. They come from the pub trade and seem to know what they’re doing, not amateurs just having a bash. The one downside is the bloody TV is on all the time, slightly too loud, playing some kind of MTV. Not really the channel of the folk who drink in there, it would be more appropriate if it was the Shopping Channel, a bit more sedate and less intrusive. I got speaking to a bloke in there when it re-opened and now I’ve been roped into umpiring for the village cricket team. Might give the rest of the season a miss and get involved next year.

I did tell him that since qualifying as a Level 1 Umpire a few years back I have never umpired a match, I am all theory and no practice - but it didn’t appear to put him off. The impression I was getting is that they’d be grateful for any sentient warm body to fill their white coat. Well, illness aside, I am confident I can stick my finger up with the best of them, white coat or not. Roll on next season.

LOWER LIFE 11
Bloody terrible week. The Green Man has closed. Tara and Donna have clearly had enough. I’m not sure of the reasons why they’ve moved on but usually it’s down to rent. The problem with pub companies (big and small) is that they’re really not pub companies, they’re property companies. I appreciate that they’ve got to make their investments pay but there’s always something very short-termish about the way in which they do their business.

Pubs, particularly those with enthusiastic, experienced and knowledgeable staff can do really well. They should be little gold mines. But as with most things, it’s the economy stupid! The owners of these wonderful buildings, rather than nurture the businesses that sit in them seem intent on bleeding them. Not in a symbiotic relationship where both benefit, but in one where the owner actively wants to screw the tenant to the point of destruction. And they rarely care for the tenant or the public who use the public house. Their main concern is their asset and even if it stands empty it is always accruing market value.

So you see these brilliant pubs, run by wonderful entrepreneurial people, opening, running and closing as a matter of course, usually on a two year cycle. Sometimes they close for good and the owner of the building will get a decent return by selling off the building, car park and beer garden for housing. More often than not another bright spark will come along and sink his redundancy money into a business doomed to failure.

Running a boozer is not a s easy as you think. First off, the new publican should attempt to remain as sober as possible for as long as possible. It’s not like being a writer where frankly you can be drunk all the time. You need your wits about you. Second, being a publican is a lifestyle and not something you can pick up and have a play with for a couple of days a week. Running a pub is NOT a viable option for an easy retirement. This is a seven day a week operation. Look at Wetherspoon’s opening hours, very often 8am to midnight every singe day of the week. I promise you will not be able to compete with that.
In addition, you often get folk who want to run pubs who have no idea that the industry is the HOSPITALITY BUSINESS. Hospitality is a real skill, particularly as you have to fake sincerity to every drunken pub bore who comes through the door. Making idiots feel at ease as you extract money from them is a tricky business. Social skills are a must here. As is a cursory knowledge of the drinks you’re selling. Does the average man in the street know how to change a barrel or how to keep real ale? Does he know the difference between syrah and shiraz? Does he know the key ingredient in cider? Will he be able to make a serviceable gin and tonic? You’ve got to know a lot of stuff and take real care when ordering stock and serving these drinks for your customers to be satisfied and keep coming back.

So it’s the end of an era with Tara and Donna going, they moved into the Green Man the week I had the offer accepted on this house in this little village about three and a half years ago. In reality I should have checked out the pub before putting the offer in but there we go - I’d have still signed up. They were very good at running the pub and really put the hours in. They worked on the food, pizza night, curry night, Sunday roasts and all. They made the most of the field out the back, camping, music, weddings and who can forget bonfire night? There’s nothing like the sight of a man setting light to his own trousers. It’s sad to see them go.

The new chapter? Well according to Facebook it re-opens on Monday with Susan and Carl at the helm so all is not lost. I just hope they have the experience, resilience and energy to make a good go of it. Little villages need pubs and the next village along the pub there, well it used to be a pub, it’s more of a restaurant now, it’s far too close to Iain Duncan Smith for my liking. I like the intimacy and community of the Green Man, it’s a functional pub, no olives thank you, it’s workers and retirees, it’s school committees and darts teams, it’s ham, egg and chips and good beer.
I think I’d better get down there a bit more often. Use it or lose

LOWER LIFE 10
It’s been a week of hits and misses. The problem, and I think it’s a human one rather than one unique to me, is that the misses always seem to outweigh the hits.

On the plus side I had a piece published in the Sunday Telegraph on a lovely little pub in Edinburgh which has gone down tremendously well. Emails from afar, well as far as Edinburgh have tumbled into my inbox like very welcome rain on this very parched ground. I can say that there’s nothing quite as self-indulgently pleasing as having your name printed in the national press. Knowing that on that Sunday morning your name is in print in every newsagent in every city, town and village across the country. More strikingly for me the Telegraph is my Old Man’s paper and I know he’ll raise a smile when he sees my name there. On the downside, it’s the bloody Sunday Telegraph and there’s no more a Bufton-Tufton, Golf Club, Outraged of Tunbridge Wells, Brexit loving rag out there. We’re poles apart, politically, my Old Man and me. One nil to him.

On the down side there were a couple of things I’ve felt quite left out by. First is the judging of the World Beer Awards this week and what galls me is that I wasn’t invited (again) to be a judge. I was on the original tasting panels for this award some years ago but I’ve not been invited since. I suppose I should stamp my little feet and send some emails but it’ll all sound like so much sour beer. I think I may have blotted my copy-book with them by suggesting that I had never tasted a beer made by Brewdog that I’d liked. Oh Man! Believe me this is heresy. I’m surprised I wasn’t dragged out there and then and strung up.

But the thing about judging in drinks competitions (and I do a lot of that) is that just because you don’t like the drink doesn’t mean you can’t assess it on its merits. I don’t like the vast majority of the wine I judge but it doesn’t mean I can’t identify a good one. And I am not conceited enough to think that just because I don’t like Brewdog’s beers I am right and the rest of the drinking world is wrong - you don’t go creating billion pound, multi-national breweries by accident.

The second omission this week was my name on the guest list at Lord’s for the launch of Sir Ian Botham’s new range of wines. I got the bloody press release, oh yes, but not the bloody invite. Bastards. And me, as the biggest fan of Beefy and a writer on the more commercial wines out there, it was the perfect fit.

So in an effort to engender some good will with the all mighty Sir Ian I will review these wines without even tasting them, this is not in any way a piss take, these are my tasting notes for what I’d expect from the wines listed on their press release. I am playing this with a straight bat.

·Barossa 81 Series Shiraz. Deep and inky looking. Big forward black fruit. Aromas of cassis, blackcurrant, black currant leaf and vanilla. Full bodied, powerful alcohol (15%) concentrated damson and plum on the palate, cinnamon, coconut. Long hot finish.
·Margaret River 76 Series Chardonnay. Toward golden in colour. Intense tropical fruit nose, mango, papaya, pineapple. Dry and refreshing but the acidity doesn’t match the fullness of the fruit on the palate. Big on flavour, a touch unbalanced but very expressive. Creamy malolactic finish.
·Coonawrara 80 Series Cabernet Sauvignon. Smoke and spice on the nose. Palate is all bramble and hedgerow. Supporting the big blackberry palate is a lovely black pepper note and some interesting and quite angular tannins. The tannic structure really supports the fruit giving a pleasing uncomplicated BBQ wine. Lovely spicy, wood-smoke finish.

This all might be complete bollocks of course. You’ll be able to find out in the Autumn when they’re released, the press release didn’t say who’ll be stocking them, but they’ll be priced around the £12 mark. To bolster this ‘Series’ range there will be entry level wines under the Botham All Rounder banner (£8.99) and the Sir Ian Botham Collection, wines at £30 to sold by Berry Brothers and Rudd.

On the plus side the invitations have started to roll in for this autumn’s wine tasting season, so I am loved in some quarters and will continue to provide first rate tasting notes on all of the main retailers drinks ranges on the excellent www.thedrinker.co.uk

Note to self, let’s try to concentrate on the hits and take heart that the misses aren’t all that bad and raise a glass of Shriaz or Punk IPA to shameless self promotion.

LOWER LIFE 9
“Another sunny day so let’s go where we’re happy and I’ll meet you at the cemetery gates…”
Spent a day wandering around Highgate Cemetery, something that I’ve been meaning to do for many years and finally got around to. A very hot London day up on the hill but lovely to walk around in the shade among the stones and the dead. Highgate’s big star is Karl Marx who has the biggest effigy in the yard and he sits like a grumpy Father Christmas in his own lefty corner accompanied by Paul Foot, Ralph Milliband and other shining lights of the global socialist movement, pleasingly they’re all over-looked by Max Wall which seems to give the place a bit of levity.
I’m not sure what Max Wall’s politics were, he was properly ‘out there’ as a performer, really one of a kind. And it was lovely to see monuments to George Elliot, Alan Sillitoe and Malcolm McLaren, all innovators and dissenters - a good gang to be among.

I got to think, do any other philosophers get the same reverence as Marx? Can’t think of any, and I certainly can’t think of similar folk from the right who get the same treatment. Is this a rather mawkish thing the left have? You can go to see the remains of Lenin and Mao but the shining stars of the right all seem to be invisible. Churchill, I suppose is the only palatable one from that side of the spectrum, and World War Two aside he didn’t strike me as the most noble type. I can’t see Jacob Rees Mogg or BJ getting the same accolades.

Maybe this isn’t a left-right thing but more a British thing? Walking around any cemetery is a bit like being in the Victorian age, dark, gothic and brooding, it puts you in your place - which is ironic because if there’s one thing that unites us all it’s the inevitable arrival of the Grim Reaper.

I’ve got this thing that the media keep pulling up at the moment about the football bringing all of us (the English) together. In the darkness and division of Brexit we have the shining light of English civility that is Gareth Southgate and with a collective low expectation he rather pleased us all and united the country. Utter bollocks. Yes, a good few million of us might have watched some matches on the telly and felt a part of the collective endeavor (Marx would have been proud) but as soon as the tournament is over and team came home we’re back to casual racism and the ‘you can’t park here’ mentality that runs through our blood.

It was the same with the Olympics in London, a party that wasn’t for the majority of the country, it was certainly nice to be reminded of the miracle of the industrial revolution, the formation of the NHS and the fact we invented the internet and Mr Bean and for a second there we were really quite proud of our contribution. But only a few weeks later we were back to our old selves, turning refugees away and patting Nigel Farage on the back. It’s sort of what the nation is, nasty, inward looking and uncivil while all the time pretending that we’re open, welcoming and warm.

So where am I going with this? It’s all very well remembering the past, the achievements of the great and the good and even ourselves, but it gets us nowhere unless we keep on keeping on with it. It’s no good being a bastard all week and then going to Church on a Sunday to repent only to be a bastard again on Monday morning. Same as wearing a poppy every November, it's all well and good but if we keep sending more poor bastards off to kill other poor bastards what's the point?

Life, as I discovered in Highgate Cemetery can be cruelly short, lets try to do our best, follow the best and keep being better. Let’s celebrate the great and keep putting up statues to them but only if that comes with the promise to emulate them in some way. Come on team, we’re a bit better than this.

Lower 19
There is something magnificent about starting the weekend with a Bloody Mary. By starting the weekend I mean Friday breakfast. As I write I am sitting in the beautiful Still Room, the restaurant of The Swan, Adnams flagship hotel in the lovely Suffolk seaside town of Southwold. I have devoured a full English and am now settling in to my second Bloody Mary. It is 9am Friday morning. I see through the window that out in the square hardy dog walkers are braving this frosty January morning, shop folk are opening up and doddery old buggers are driving the wrong way up one way streets. Only last night in neighbouring Norfolk the Duke of Edinburgh did much the same at a t-junction - apparently no Bloody Mary’s had been taken.

The joy of this breakfast cocktail is that it has all the ingredients to help the body recover from the night before. I learnt this form the late Pete McCarthy in his wonderful piece ‘The Hangover Show’ where he went into some length about the restorative benefits of a drink while wearing a dressing-gown. “Tomato juice”, I recall he said, “is packed full of the potassium and vitamin C that the booze took out of you last night, and the little bit of alcohol lets the body down gently”.

Sitting here after a decent night on the sauce, I can definitely see his point. Having stayed here over night in a room bigger than my house I availed myself of the Adnam’s hospitality. A few pints of their decent ale, a dinner, a glass of Burgundy with my haddock, a glass of Malbec with my ribeye. No pudding, far too stuffed, so I enjoyed a glass of their excellent Triple Malt Whisky, made with oats, wheat and barley and aged in new American oak barrels, soft and sweet, toward Bourbon in style.

I was so stuffed after all that lot I needed a stroll along the sea-front. By god it was bitter. A sharp clear night but still the Southwold lighthouse shone out across the Channel. So perishing was the wind that I needed to take shelter in a pub. I found myself in a conversation with a customer and barman about when you’re young and drink a lot and go to bed you get what the barman called the ‘hurdy gurdys’ or my late in-laws would call the ‘whirling pits’. You know that feeling, we’ve all had it. Lying in bed after a proper session and the ceiling moves, close your eyes and you’re giddy, open them and you’re sick. I’m told that if you put your hand on the floor it stops, but the conversation was about why we don’t get them as older people. Tolerance I suppose.

I’m developing a great deal of tolerance for Southwold, the sea, the air filled with the wonderful yeasty brewery aroma, chips. People are at ease here. They are at ease as they are pretty much extremely wealthy. If ever I was to take up burglary I would start in the vacant holiday homes of Southwold in January. It’s a long way away from anywhere and doesn’t appear to have a police station.

Today I shall endure a paddle in the North Sea (it is the North Sea here and not the Channel isn’t it?). I have arthritis in my feet so I assume that the excruciating pain of the cold water will in some way do me good. That’s got to be complete balls hasn’t it, it sounds like homeopathy to me, something painful must be doing some good. Nonsense. I shall paddle nonetheless, it’s my birthright as an Englishman.

After my dip and a walk along the prom it’s a pint in one of the excellent pubs, The Nelson I think, and a crossword and then afternoon tea. I do love it here, it’s a long way from anywhere and that, I Suppose is its charm. You’ve really got to go out of your way to enjoy the pleasures of Southwold but if you can’t be bothered to travel all this way do look out their excellent ales and their even better Vodka.

You might think that all vodka tastes of nothing, Smirnoff has a lot to answer for, but well made, using tip top ingredients, it’s a joy. Adnams make three very good vodkas, East Coast is the entry level, very good with a touch of butterscotch on the finish, Rye Hill with peppery rye overtones and then the world’s best vodka Longshore. What makes it a world champ? They use three grains, oats, wheat and barley, so it’s a triple malt much like the whisky and it’s distilled in a pot still which adds character. It has depth and body with a wonderfully subtle sweet toffee note. Served neat and chilled it’ll help warm my freezing feet up later.

Lower 18
So Christmas came and went. It was quite a decent one bizarrely as it involved numerous trips to Basingstoke General to visit my Nan. Nan is my Mum’s Mum, she is 92, poor eyesight, selectively hard of hearing and just before the festive period she broke her hip tripping down the last step on her staircase.

So having the jaunts down to Hampshire, what seemed every two days, took all the pressure out of Christmas and there were no family fireworks, tears or stormings out and the boozing was kept to a safe minimum.

I was less than impressed by Basingstoke General, the first bed the old girl was in was in a ‘trauma ward’. No-one’s going to get better in there now are they? It was full of old ladies who’d fallen down the bottom step but many of whom seemed to be suffering from some form of dementia. It was a wholly pitiful and frightening experience. That’ll be me in 30 years (if I’m lucky). The screams of the damned, the pain of the condemned, it was like the seventh circle of hell - but with regular offers of tea.

On the plus side, I started wearing jeans again. I’ve not worn jeans since the early to mid-nineties and what a revelation it is! This all began with a pre-Christmas wardrobe update thanks to Jacamo (the Saville Row for fatties), I went big on pants, shirts and took a punt on jeans. Jean technology has seriously moved on since I wore my last pair of 501s, they’re pleasingly all stretchy now. I was afraid at first I was wearing a pair of trendy denim leggings and looked a bit like Max Wall but the mirror doesn’t lie. I cut quite a dash, a rather fat dash, but a dash nonetheless.

Back in my school days I had a similar wardrobe update and recall being mocked I the rather well written but strictly under the counter sixth form mag with the sentence “goodbye buff chinos, hello sexy black denim!”. And for me at the time I went big, black denim 501s and a black denim jacket. Sexy indeed, I was beating them off with a shitty stick!

The New Year came with all the excitement of a Commons Brexit debate, I’ve never been a big fan of the enforced jollity of New Year’s Eve. A walk and a pint, a bite to eat with some friends and then home before lights out. But the new year did see a brilliant trip up to Sheffield to watch the mighty Luton Town draw nil-nil with Wednesday. None of your enforced jollity here, it was all relaxed laughs aplenty with me and my three oldest mates.

Last year we went up on the train to see Luton play Newcastle, a lovely day out which began on an early train out of Kings Cross with the ceremonial cracking open of the Kronenbourg just after we got to Stevenage. It’s a long way to Newcastle. Then a few pints in town and a couple in the stadium, one or two on the way back to the station and then a few on the train on the way home. It was not a pretty site.

This year we learned from the Newcastle lesson. Early departure and early kick off meant it was prudent not to drink at all on the train at all. A couple in the excellent Sheffield station bar and none during the match, this meant we were good for a few on the way back and then a couple in the Betjeman at St. Pancras. All fully compost mental.

I’m not a big fan of Sheffield it’s an ugly, awkward town with no redeeming features I can think of, save the Station Bar. I always got lost driving around it as a student, I once wrote off an Audi and a Ford Transit there, that wasn’t a good night. Most of all I remember my first experience of premature ejaculation there, apologies Sophie. As a student I had friends in Sheffield and so would trip down there for larks and bands. I was rapt by the lovely Sophie and she clearly thought me a reasonable prospect but sadly my first attempt was very short lived. The plus side of it all is that as a 20 year old you’re able to re-load and get back on the horse, apologies again Sophie, bad metaphor.

You see you can wear all the black denim you like but in shitty Sheffield there’s no hiding place.

Lower 17
Off into town at the weekend to see John Cooper Clarke at the Palladium. Met up with friends for a convivial lunch at The Chipping Forecast, posh fish and chips. Word of advice, probs best not demolish a large bloody mary and then three bottles of white wine before an evening of contemporary poetry, looking back I don’t think I got the best value out of the ticket.

We got into town early enough for a mooch around and a glass of wine at Fortnums, moving swiftly up Piccadilly to the pop-up Sipsmith for a negroni, then into Soho for few pints and a whisky in Milroy’s before lunch. Hitting a theatre bar after all that lot I decided that the only way to go was more white wine, so a bottle for the first half and the same again for the second. Up to Euston, I stole a can of Pimms and bought another bottle of white, which, by this time I decided it was prudent not to open.

On the train, apparently, I was not the best company. I don’t recall. And I naturally woke swearing ‘never again’. Not for me, for Her; the hangovers don’t work like that for me. It’s Her I feel for. I’m not the nicest sober, and then I gave her noisy drunken Hell on the train. She’s a bloody saint. And I swore that I would get all this under control and behave myself in the future. How many times have we all heard that?

Later in the week the Old Man came for his annual visit. He’s not the drinker he was but by god we still put some away. Thursday was beer and red wine with a few nips of bourbon to see the night off. Friday we went out for a few pints, some old haunts in Leighton Buzzard, back to the Green Man where She picked us up and took us to meet family in a curry house in Fenny Stratford. Back home for a settler, a bottle of Port between us. Saturday was betting, horses and rugby, joined by a beer or two and then out for a posh pub dinner with the family again, beer, wine and brandy. He always orders it as a ‘Cognac’ and the waiter always need an explanation. Then back home and some Scotch.

Never again. I was not on offensive form, just drank far too much. She was still an angel again. Amazing grace.

It’s that time of year again, Christmas always comes too early and is over before it’s started, I need another four weeks before the festivities start. I think it might be all the advertising that makes me feel so behind, It’s quite aggressive this year. So I’m scaling down, skint apart from anything else. All my loved ones are getting next to nothing, slippers, a cheap watch, a book and a t-shirt. There, done it. On whatever level this December aggressive isn’t working.

It’s still ten days to Christmas and I’m already full up. Absolutely bloated on mince pies and advocaat. I know I’m not alone in saying that the New Year will bring in a newer me. I say it every year and I’m still fatter year on year, still drink more, still upset more people, particularly the ones I love. It has to stop. It’s too much all this Christmas, never again.

Lower 16
Had a bit of a dressing down at the weekend. I’d been on the sauce pretty much from mid-day and by nine I was entering the twilight zone. It’d been a long day, managed to escape baby sitting duties and scarpered to the pub to watch the England New Zealand match, during which, and I don’t think this is at all acceptable I was sharing a table with two individuals, one of whom didn’t buy a drink all match, the other part way through the second half decided to drum up a Brexit conversation.
These two people, who clearly didn’t know each other used my captivity to begin to berate me for voting Remain. Well that’s a red rag isn’t it - in much the same way as if I was a leaver and they wanted to bang on about staying in. My point isn’t the standpoint, it is that there was a discussion all during what was a riveting match.

We all parted quite amicably, I guess because Mr Tightarse wasn’t in his cups and the other chap, a local farmer was very merry on his two half pints.

I was dragged out of that boozer and off for a cheap tea at Wetherspoons, perfectly acceptable after eight pints. Then on to the main event of the evening, the sister in-law’s amateur dramatics show, appropriately enough for Remembrance weekend Black Adder Goes Forth. All very jolly and I won some M&S biscuits in the raffle. Any road up a couple more pints during the show and then off to the Tiger for a few more.

It was at this point that I was forced again to defend my hand as a Remainer by yet another East Yorkshire Leaver. Red rag again. Having a skinful I gave my friend chapter and verse on how when we have vacancies for 10,000 midwives, 20,000 nurses, 10,000 doctors, 7,000 soldiers, 20,000 engineers, 6,000 carpenters, 12,000 builders, 22,000 agricultural workers and 65,000 in the hospitality industry to name but a few - that immigration was not a problem but a necessity. I may have stated my case too loudly and used language inappropriate for the lounge bar of a pub but it needed saying. With a need for 35,000 care workers we don’t have enough people to wipe the arses that need wiping.

It turns out that this didn’t go down too well in some quarters and so I got a bit of a telling off in the morning which only compounded the hangover. Hangovers seem to last a lot longer these days, particularly when they have an emotional element. As it turns out the guy I was haranguing was not offended in the slightest, I recall he, his wife and I drinking and conversing quite civilly into the night, it was a bystander who’d got the arse. I was being ticked off as some guy was upset on another guy’s behalf. Jeez.

So there we go, emotional hangover all week, I may have been a bit too loud and shouty but I hadn’t upset anyone at all. Makes you think. So it’s good to get into London for a bit of peace and quiet. My first pint of the week is in The Betjamen Arms in St. Pancras Station where I found myself surrounded by Masons. You quite often see gangs of delinquent Masons in London, all suited up and more often than not carrying over-sized black brief cases, they look like the most respectable art students ever. In this bunch was a dullard banging on about gin, I know a fair bit about gin, but the golden rule is that you NEVER TALK TO THE MASONS! Dangerous animals the Masons. Bad people, we all know what they did to Princess Diana.

I think on reflection that less bothered about these old geezers and more annoyed I’ve never been asked to join. I clearly wouldn’t join, but you’d like to be asked wouldn’t you? I’m sure we’d not be suited as I’m not a massive fan of the Queen and also I know too much about gin. And from the week’s experience I’m a bit too loud and shouty when confronted by Leavers - you can’t think there is a single Remainer in the Masons can you? I’m confident that the Queen’s a Remainer, the blue hat with the yellow spots at the State Opening of Parliament was the giveaway. The Queen and her people wouldn’t have made a statement like that by accident. Maybe she’s not such a bad old girl after all, I could get hammered with her on Dubonet and gin and not have to mention the shortage of arse wipers once.