Bath full of offal

This week, mainly on Harriet's recommendation but partly to satisfy curiosity, Phill and I went to the Olde England pub for our traditional Thursday night beer. Highly praised by H and other friends this is a charming if somewhat strange hostelry. What used to be a Victorian house on a corner is now a pub serving up to ten real ales, loads of fruit wines and liqueurs and real ciders, the clincher being the legend "No lager sold here" on the door! Suits me, sir.

There are two floors both the size of a medium sized living room given over to large wooden tables and chairs. What may once have been a second bedroom upstairs has been partitioned into the loos which hold one person at a time only, although they have managed to have separate facilities for gents and ladies, and the bar which is basically a serving hatch, again with room for one person at a time. It didn't take long for queues to form.

As for the ambience, it's a great little place. With no jukebox or fruit machine, or TV, you have to...engage in conversation, remember that? As you are sat round a large table you'd have to be a complete misanthrope to not at least acknowledge the presence of the strangers you are sat near, and soon enough Phill and I were chatting to Emma & John from Leeds, who were playing Scrabble. If you know us two, you can imagine what happened next, and apologies to our new friends, but we kind of took over their game, Phill assisting Emma and me John, who kept telling me he felt completely out of his depth, heheh. After struggling to start with Team J&R triumphed by the end. Wahey! Checking later it seems Phill and I contributed a word each that...ahem....do not actually exist, even in the rarefied upper atmospheres of Scrabble Genius. What is it folk say about smartarses?

We'll certainly be going back there, that's for sure, maybe with a less cavalier attitude to the dictionary, oh, and the beer is amazingly cheap too!
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Farcebook, we all love it don't we? So far I have not been frogmarched into the virtual torture chamber that is Timeline, and so I still see the fun targeted advertising down the right side of my News Feed page. Today I have all the usual gubbins advertising everything from mobile phones (I've just got a new one), music festivals (well, obvious really), Internet browsers (more tallying to burgeoning nerd factor no doubt), to Daz Soap Club (what on earth is that, and how do they know I wash? And we prefer Persil in our house, so there). Stuck at the bottom of the list is one tagged "Boyfriends wanted" purportedly from a girls' dating agency that bravely chose to call itself "Plenty Of Fish". Oh dear....
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At work I occasionally like to have some background music and Wednesday's choice was Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. For those of you old enough, that's "Rrrrrimmmsssky Kkkoorrrrsakov" - ask your mum or your dad. Anyway here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZKlFcjHBZY&feature=related

Obviously I don't watch the video but occasionally check a look to see how far in we are, and at around 22:30 minutes in I noticed the guy in the audience in the blue T-shirt appeared to be asleep. In fact if you fast forward to 23 minutes, he's well away. I'm sure we've all been guilty of similar behaviour, and my soma inducing environment of choice used to be the theatre, which I've not been to for years as it always saw me fighting with creeping unconsciousness, despite the too small and very uncomfortable seating that Shoesville's Art Deco theatre offered at the time. Now I'm 200 years older I just know I'd be out like a light probably even before the safety curtain has gone up.
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The idea of me taking exercise is about as unlikely as finding a chin in a Tory cabinet, but noticing my girth expanding slowly but surely and my weight going ever upwards I decided to download a pedometer app (ooh you trendy so-and-so) on to my new-fangled mobile telephonic and computing device that goes by the unfortunate name of "AccuPedo" - Sun readers could easily get confused. They probably used the same marketing guy who came up with "Plenty Of Fish". Anyways, the mythical target for those who "pedo" (ahem) is 10000 steps a day. Sounds a lot and it is, about 4¾ miles at my stride length. I walk to and from work every day, which it turns out is just over 5500 steps, leaving me 4500 steps to tread before the calories I burn up exceeds the amount I shovel in to any worthwhile extent.

In order to achieve this I have been taking ever more circuitous routes to work but I still have not hit the target. At this rate I'm going to have to get a bus to the next town and walk home.

Now, where's that Crunchie?
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