Next time... tea festival?

This weekend's ale festival in Preston had me quite excited. It ran from Thursday afternoon to Sunday night, and had an ale count in three figures. I was planning to head down on Friday, before the best stuff was gone. Then I decided it might be better to stay at home, shivver, and throw up. So I did that. ...In hindsight, though it may have saved me some cash, I can't say that was really an enjoyable alternative.

Oh well, I thought, I'll go on Saturday! But no, snowed in. Eight inches never stopped me doing anything before, but... you can finish this joke on your own time.

Nigella's just said she's, "going to do violence to that" cake or whatever she's making. Why the hell does that turn me on?

So, Sunday. Many people had been snowbound on Saturday, and there were, reportedly, plenty of ales left for the last day. At about six PM I decided to head into town and spend a couple of hours sampling what remained. Oh, but the next bus that can get me to town -though I live close to the main connecting road between the county capital and an adjacent resort town of ninety-thousand people- will arrive there, weather allowing, around eight PM, and the last bus back leaves at around half-past eight. And so I missed the whole ruddy festival.

Next time, I'm going on Thursday, and drinking the ruddy lot.

Instead, tonight, I have been down the local for a couple of pints taken in the armchair by the fireplace. Bollocks to skating about on ice in the middle of the flag market! Granted, walking two miles through said inches of snow at minus ten degrees celsius may have brought me into some disagreement with my circulatory system, particularly as it relates to peripheral parts such as the fingers with which I am so painfully typing this waste of a blog, but I am now pleasantly tipsy. Well, from my perspective, at least. Maybe less so for everyone else, as I've mostly either been telling them why they should be ashamed of themselves, or staring at their tits, depending on relevant factors, but, ultimately, I have a nice tingly feeling, so I suppose that means it's all good.

Beer before wine...

...and you'll feel fine. Wine before wysgi, whisky, vodka, and more wysgi, and... an egg butty is very much required, along with a protracted period of sitting quietly.

I'm not sure where this post is headed. Probably it'll just be about food. I'm hungry, and I've come here direct from drinking, and chatting shite. I've just realised that I initially posted this without a comma, potentially leading readers to suppose that I'd been drinking shite.

Anyway, in the course of the chatting, I learned that, allegedly, "Bean mince is ace, better than beef."

My first thought, and only direct response, was that, well, "Beef is shite."

I've never quite managed to get entirely on board with vegetarianism, though I don't think it's a bad idea, but the world's obsession with beef is not something I can understand, I've had beef three times in my life, and each time it made me angry for a different reason. And at no point was I a Hindu.

First time, it was a McDonald's burger, given to me by a friend -or someone I'd hitherto thought to be a friend-, and made me angry that he'd tried to palm that crap off on me, and that I couldn't even find a tramp who'd take it off my hands. I'm told that I later trashed that McDonalds, but I've no memory of this alleged incident.

Second time, it was Aberdeen Angus, and I was angry that it cost more than a blow-job from Jebus, and tasted worse than giving him one.

Third time, it was raw, and dipped in some kinda seaweed juice, and I was angry that my girlfriend was Japanese.

To slightly misquote one or other Homer, "Yo, goober, why the beef?"

In passing...

Lately, insomnia has ruled. So, yester... wait... yeah, I think it... what day is this? I think that I spent about twenty hours in bed, so hopefully that's... sorted. Hm. It certainly seems that my brain's plenty rested, eh?

I recently read what I think may be the greatest description ever applied to an object. "Aboriginal emu caller" it indicated. "Used to arouse the curiosity of emus."

Okay.

Better yet, the object in question looked to my uninitiated eye very much like what I might have described as a sawn-off didgeridoo, which leads me to wonder... what the fuck were they trying to arouse when they started making full-size didgeridoos?

Right, now that we're all picturing Big Bird being drawn into an alley off the Street and taken-out with a boomerang...

How about that weather, eh? Windy. 80mph. Fences aren't where they used to be. Police are restraining a dangerous tree. I like the sound of that. More than I like the sound of this £1 ale. It comes with the story of the name, which ends enticingly, "...it was largely beer that had been returned to the brewery as undrinkable by more fastidious customers."

Thirty bajillion days later...

My Dogtanian T-shirt is losing the decal that gives its name, but it's doing it coloured-layer by coloured-layer. Once a happy sort of yellow, now mostly but not entirely grey, it seems as if Dogtanian has pissed on his own shoes, and tried to mop it up with the otherwise needlessly flamboyant feather in his hat. I think this is pretty much the way that I want to present myself to the world.

Lately the fly is back. A depressed feeling that I'd like to dispel with the sort of hand gesture as might shoo off an insect intent on flying repeatedly at my head. I don't know. It's the uncertainty and stagnation that's been building ever since I came back to this side of the world, really. I've no idea what I want to do next, I've forgotten -if I ever knew- how to do it anyway, and I no longer know how to explain what I've been doing in the meantime.

In hopes of at least lifting my mood I decided to finally make an effort at learning -even if only to a limited degree as may suit no particular use what so ever- another language, and doing some regular exercise beyond the current if largely pointless daily walk around the village. Exciting times indeed. Having obtained by entirely lawful means a copy of some popular language learning software, and despite my best intentions, I've actually spent much of the day being cheered-up by repeated listenings to the voiceover-woman's proper Welsh pronunciation of eliffant (I'll leave you to wonder at the possible meaning of that most cryptic word). Alas, I don't think that the Welsh course goes much beyond some basic vocabulary, so I'm trying to decide what to make do with. Spanish seems like it might actually be, y'know, useful, but the CD contains only American Spanish, and I'm still considering the implications. French or German may make a little more sense given that, having studied both in a half-arsed fashion umpteen years ago, I could actually have somewhere in the recesses of my mind a basic understanding of either, waiting to be triggered, and as a bonus the former would mean that maybe I'd finally be able to appreciate Diabologum's lyrics. Decisions, decisions. Likely inconsequential decisions.

As to the exercise, I dunno, maybe I'll just walk faster.

Good news of the day: while the deli still won't bring back butter pies, the bakery across the square has finally got on board with the food that got me through college (sort of).

Moving on, quote of the day comes from the mysterious mind of Líam and reads, quite simply, as follows: "This isn't helping my biscuit-rage!"

There was a whole biscuity debate to provide context for that remark, I must add. It probably had something to do with my lament that invading oreos are inferior, inedible, and in our biscuit tins.

Headline of the day is crickety in nature, which is always good, and reads as such: "Anderson fit for ashes."

All right, he is from Burnley, but come on, that's a bit harsh.

Before I go, a note to myself: In polite company, no matter how dull anecdotes about a recently-heard radio programme may be, if they happen to feature tales about some guy's first job in a lab and his accidental breeding of excess test mice and subsequent shoebox/cottonwool/chloroform -> furnace -> explosion disposal debacle, one's weary reply should not feature the term, "Mousewitch".

After silence, stutters.

Bank holiday Monday. Means more to some than others, but in any event it still feels like a holiday. I am spending its early part drinking tea and listening to False Priest while engaged in this much belated return to rambling into the blogosphere, and plan to spend its later part playing Premier Manager 2, having recovered the Amiga 600 from the attic.

Early 'nineties gaming and not-yet-released music. The way forward, or at least sideways. Tip of the cap to the Doktorb over there for providing the musics, and while I'm at it I suppose to dad for buying the 'puter the better part of eighteen years ago.

What has been going on this month? Some drinks have been drunk. Cricket has been at its best and worst. I became briefly resolved to see through a Pulgasari shadow puppet theatre production after it was suggested to me that Kim Jong-il may be haunted by the fact that he's just no Pol Pot and I began to wonder what might happen if he were. I also remember pondering and discussing the perpetual white-maleness and decreasing age of the Doctor, and while I don't have a problem that he always appears to be sort-of British, I had wondered whether he might manifest a British-Bengali, which I'd be okay with, or even a woman, which I don't think would sit so well, since he'd be all "They're boobs. I have boobs now. Boobs are cool." which would probably get old pretty fast. In short, then, very little has been happening over here.

So little, in fact, that I found myself re-reading archived rantings from a time when I could be bothered to 'blog' on a more frequent basis, and had more than one digit in my regular readership figures. I think that it has given me some insight into why we (well, I, at least) tend to forget dreams within minutes of waking, because -and I know, as I wrote at the time, that everyone loves to hear about other people's dreams- I committed one in particular to text, and, well... turns out, in this dream, I had found a small chimpanze, living in some public toilets with a dead swan, which was once its only friend and was now its only attire. While this Bjork-chimp may have had style it was, surprisingly given its cushy lifestyle, mentally disturbed, and prone to tantrums. The only way to calm it, and I'll be damned if I know how I was supposed to have figured this out, was to have it dance like a robot. Long story short, some years ago I had a dream about a chimp that danced the robot in a urinal while wearing the fetid remains of the swan it had loved. Your move, Salad Fingers.

Well, this has been completely worthwhile for both of us, I'm sure. I'd really rather be spending this, probably one of the year's last days of sunshine, in a beer garden, but without money for beer that's just shite, so Of Montreal and seeing if we can get Southport into the Premiership it is!

Pardon?

"You're just jealous."
"Of what, the Welsh Assembly?"
"No."
"Oh."

So, turns out that starting a new blog dealy was probably a waste of time, eh? I've not done a great job of updating this thing and, to be honest, it took reading that a roided-up ex-bouncer named for a medieval defensive earthwork found the time in the middle of a gun rampage to sit down and knock out forty pages to make me think that, really, I could probably find five minutes between getting a haircut and having another butter pie to put together a few meandering paragraphs. So, here they are.

On the not-very-interesting subject of Mr.Moat, by the way, I predict that this will all come to a head when he tries to shoot another copper but succumbs to writer's cramp and drops his gun.

Meanwhile, in far more important news, Murali's retiring from proper cricket. Can't blame him since he's 38 and playing for five days straight against the best players in the world probably isn't terribly easy, but world sport is just about to get that much less interesting, and I hadn't much enthusiasm for it to begin with. I've not much more to say about it other than that I wouldn't mind going to Galle later this month to watch his last game. Anybody fancy giving me a lift to Sri Lanka? I expect he'll finish just shy of 800 test wickets (in twelve fewer matches than it took Warne to get, what, 708 or so at the expense of two or three more runs a piece?) unless he really rips into the Indians.

Ah well, even without him, and Sanath, and Sachoo, and the lamentable impact of the (increasingly) limited overs formats, cricket will still be more worthwhile than the footy, I should think.

Recently I had one of those thrilling conversations with an ill-informed and strangely irate nationalist deals involving an American chap who was getting into 'soccer' for the first time thanks to the world cup. He was completely carried away by his team's extremely lucky draw with a god-awful England (which, by the by, didn't bother me... I was rather hoping that Slovenia might go through) and, for whatever reason, taking the opportunity to defend America's role in the world. "I dont think we owe the world a damn thing!" he asserted, for reasons best known to himself, "You owe like fourteen trillion dollars, dude." I observed, but naturally he was able to offer a relevant counter, pointing out that, after all, "Without us the world would be speaking German and Japanese.", and though I wouldn't mind being able to speak two foreign languages that would never have had any direct relevance in my home country (since Operation Sealion was abandoned before America even entered the war), I couldn't help noting that, "Without France, Spain, and the Netherlands you'd be spelling color with a u." and then he threw his shoe in a bush and that was that, because well, what else can you say?

Now, if this had been the cricket world cup, I'd not have had to endure that, and nor would you. And that's why it's a better game. And the world cup doesn't even happen in the best cricket format.

Well, that was all pretty dull, hey? There hasn't been much else to tell. I was hit in the face outside that damnable club by random can't-handle-her-drink girl and still have bruises on my arms from being grabbed by her and/or one of her mates, but really this is just another chapter in the debacle-ridden chronicles of nights-out-with-the-Doktorb that we needn't examine in much more detail and are perhaps best to just laugh-off with an, "Oh, Preston..." and the observation that, after all, those 3am chips were pretty good. Oh, and this morning I nearly choked to death over breakfast, and I think mango juice started leaking from my eye. Maybe the Ferret this weekend for't Empire State and a limited number of pints, though last time I was in there I was accused of being a scouser, so we'll just see...

I appear to be listening to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, so it's clearly time to get out of here.

Breakfast at Timperley's

This is a butter pie from the local caterers. 'tis a little bland without pepper, but amazingly greasy and crumbly and in other ways good.



While eating it I was bothered by dogs and children, but the blue-rosetted ground-pounders stopped wasting their breath on me for a while. Is pie their weakness? I hope so.

The remainder of the day has been passed in an insomniac haze, wandering around bookshops and sitting in tearooms. I belted my head on the roof of the bus, again. I am begining to suspect that the current generation of double deckers may in fact be single deckers with a second level built-in rather than on. The book shop for which I have previously-neglected Christmas vouchers (and would have otherwise shunned in favour of the little place across town) had none of this, and nothing by him, and they didn't have the other thing I wanted, either, so I got about four quid's worth of Dawkins, because, pff, four quid of anything doesn't seem likely to be regretted. Unless its two and a half pints of that ah, so that's why we can get two and a half pints for about four quid ale. But this wasn't.

In still more enthralling news, I can report having recently enjoyed my first barbecue of the year, all be it a spur of the moment affair that has at least taught us that yes, properly interfaced with a chimenea (sans chimney, which in hindsight should have been removed safely before lighting the fire rather than gingerly afterwards), about a dozen matches, and a broken chair leg/poker, a stack of UKIP leaflets will cook a chicken thigh fillet, some hash browns, and a veggie burger, and to a satisfactory crisp at that. So that bodes well for the future, even if nothing else does (I'm looking at you, Tomorrow Night).

Other topics dispensed with due to tiredness and sobriety include the story of how my great uncle was kicked out of a paragliding club after they realised he was thirty years older than he'd claimed, earning him a few column inches in one of the most ragged of national rags; the story of how he allegedly/arguably left the rest of the family destitute for a generation in making-off with great-granddad's earnings amassed in the course of becoming county welterweight (or similar) champion; the story of how I came, in the course of (what should have been) a simple CD burning process, to hate any number of outdated programmes with which my PC and I are lumbered; a little bit about how I may have finally given up on trying to convince myself that T/20 is sort of cricket and not a fucking travesty unto man; and more FFS don't elect the Tories you stupid, stupid bastards stuff.

I've never voted Tory before, but I wonder if Lorraine Fullbrook's placard could reheat a pie...