Tag: booze

The Great Western 2 for 1 pub at Shaw Ridge may have closed, its owners (who have since been taken over) fined and its senior managers sacked, but it’s of little interest to me. Unless you always go out with an even number of people in your party, the main selling point of ‘2 for 1’ seems decidedly weak… much like the flavour of the food this chain of pubs serves.

Apparently, Swindon was under a rather nasty cloud this evening.

THE sky above the town was filled with giant clouds of toxic smoke after a pile of 8,000 tyres caught light.
Twenty-two firemen tackled the giant pyre, which started burning around 7pm tonight at Lower Burytown Farm between Blunsdon and Highworth….
Clouds were visible for miles on the Swindon skyline, prompting onlookers to visit from as far away as Penhill.

News to me. At that time (7.40 pm to 8 pm, to be precise) I was on my way to a town-centre pub, facing towards Blunsdon as I walked, under a clear sky.

Update, 3 May 2007: The Adver has now put ‘dramatic pictures’ on its website. It’s clearly a big fire but does it show ‘the sky above the town was filled with giant clouds’? No. One big black cloud over open fields, that’s all.

The Bugle Coaching Inn in Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight does an excellent pie ’n’ pint. Highly recommended.

This evening, for the first time, I was served a pint of beer in a glass marked not with an engraved crown but with a printed CE mark. A sad evening indeed. I suppose I should be glad that, if only in this instance, the European Union has at last embraced an imperial unit of measurement.

Had a very good pie today at Terra Nova, which is a pub at Mermaid Quay on Cardiff Bay. It was a little lacking in gravy (just a squirt of thickish gravy around the mash) and in vegetables and the placing of the pie on top of the mash was rather too nouvelle cuisine for a meal like pie ’n’ mash, but the pie was definitely a cut above the average pub pie. Well filled with succulent meat in a beer gravy. Delicious. The pint of Brains Dark was good too.

Every evening I walk past The 12 Bar in Westcott Place. It has its opening hours on the door (and on its website)…. Except that most Tuesday evenings, well after the alleged 5 pm opening time, it is quite definitely shut, some weeks Wednesday too. Seems a very strange way to try and get custom really. If you’re heading to The 12 Bar on an evening when they haven’t got a band playing, I recommend The Greyhound just across the road. If nothing else, unlike The 12 Bar, it will be open!