OK - I'll start with the last one first and it relates to beer in no way whatsoever, unless you think my frustration might have been heightened by my urge to get back to Hitchin for a nice pint...
...I'd spent just the day in Eastbourne for an hour's light housework, a community project meeting and a catch up with fellow community-project-eer. I caught the Victoria train from Eastbourne at 5pm and it was a reasonable enough journey...right up until the point we alighted at London Victoria.
All the badly behaved, twattish, irritating people in the entire universe had congregated there solely for the purpose of making the next stage of the journey a complete nightmare.
From the usual thoughtless trolley-bag draggers who seem to have no sense of how their swerving affects people around them walking in a straight line...to the people who know the ticket barrier is coming up but don't even think about getting their ticket out UNTIL THEY ARE BLOCKING ONE OR MORE BARRIERS to those that stop abruptly at the top or bottom of escalators and stairs to pick up/put down their wretched trolley bag thereby completely disrupting everyone behind them...
But worse than that yesterday were people like the cyclist who both queue-jumped the manual ticket barrier queue and proceeded to try and elbow me out of the way in order to get in front of me and everyone else...well, I say elbow...I mean handlebar (I mean it doesn't help that there are days when the Victoria Mainline station ticket barriers just don't seem to work properly at all and all you can hear is the beep of rejected tickets, and the ensuing colourful language as everyone joins the manual barrer...AGAIN). And then there was the chap who fairly loudly announced to his companion that the best bit of the underground platform to stand on is the bit exactly where the doors to the train are so you can be first on (f*ck those trying to get off, eh?). Yes, it's just possible I derived far too much pleasure from ensuring that neither of these idiot people benefited from their twattish behaviour...but that's not the point, is it?
Oddly, you don't seem to get this level of bad behaviour at Kings Cross... demographics or station design, I wonder.
Anyway...once I finally got to Kings Cross (narrowly missing one train) I had a pleasant journey back to Hitchin and we decided we'd give the Radcliffe another try. The last time we walked in there there had only been stout on the bar, which is a pretty bad show for a GBG pub - I tweeted them to berate them later and got a bit of a token apology with an inferred "it's not our fault, we don't sell enough beer". So we weren't confident we wouldn't have a repeat performance. Thankfully, two Buntingford beers were on (Britannia and Twitchell) and were in good condition. The food, as ever, was lovely and it made a good end to the day.
Ooh - another good was a surprise trip to the Highlander for a pint last Sunday to catch the tail end of what seems to have been a jolly good beer festival. Well done, chaps.
Lastly, the bad. It's not a surprising bad, but a bad nonetheless. Last weekend we went into the Bricklayers and had a couple of pints. I had been eyeing up the Charles Wells "DNA" beer for a couple of visits and finally though that I should stop being sniffy about it and actually try it. Yuk :-(
Ah well, at least I can now be rude about it from a position of knowledge, rather than prejudice...every cloud, eh?
