this article describes the do's and don'ts of being a functional alcoholic. Makes an interesting, yet amusing, read.
Sunday was spent far closer to home, having been set aside as Surbiton Advocacy Day; basically we dragged a few of our mates down to Surbiton so they could see for themselves what the town is like, since we've been going on about what a great place it is for ages. Starting off in the town centre we treated our companions to a few of the finer hostelries, finishing off with a walk along the Thames into Kingston where we finished off at the Ram, a pub I don't particularly rate normally but a £60 win on the fruit machine and a surprising range of mad bottled beers (Grimbergen, Mort Subite, Judas) made it a very pleasant place to end the evening!
The Pumphouse had been recommended by a BITE reader, so at about half ten (note: half an hour before closing time) we found the place and went in, the ground-level door being open and welcoming, leading us downstairs to the bar. Upon our arrival we were treated to what seemed to be quite a nice place - pool table with game in progress, staff serving beer to other customers, lights on and music playing. Imagine our surprise, then, as we were told that they were in fact shut (that exact word used) when we went to order our drinks. A less shut pub it would be difficult to conceive of, but nonetheless their refusal to serve us drinks meant we had to go elsewhere for our night's final dose of sauce.
And so it was to Hennessys, a place we'd walked past en route to the Pumphouse. Now, from across the road here was a place that looked very shut; fruit machine and quiz machines off, lights low, no customers, a solitary member of staff cleaning the bar. In fact nearly half our party walked straight past in search of another establishment, but the esteemed Mike Techno decided to test the waters and lo! It wasn't shut at all; it was very close to being shut, but faced with a few thirsty pub afficionados and a clock that hadn't reached 11pm they were more than happy to serve us.
The staff at the Pumphouse have a lot to learn.
The main highlight to occur, to me at least, in the time since the last entry has to be our recent trip to Cologne, not purely because the city has more pubs and bars per head than any other city in Germany, but because we went to a place called Bastard. We've been unable thus far to find the address and phone details for this establishment which means it is lacking a BITE entry, but it'll appear soon enough.
Meanwhile we're eagerly awaiting the Great British Beer Festival not least because CAMRA have deemed BITE a suitable enough site to send us 2 tickets to the trade session. :-) We also have a plan to do a mini-blitz over EC3 this week — look at the number of suggestions! And hopefully inner-circle member Nige will have a few bars to add from his honeymoon in Tenerife; finally, there's a vague plan to attempt a pub crawl that spans 10 counties in one day... but more of that another time.