Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

I wasn’t aware that I over indulged last night at the quiz. We had a good night; Furtle and myself were joined in the pub shortly after the start of the quiz by colonel_maxim, maisiecat and Hayden (sans LJ). In quiz terms we seem to be losing our edge, getting 20 from a possible 30 for the second week in a row and falling around three points short of hitting the prize placings, but it’s all good fun and we don’t really care.

It is our practice to have a meal with the drinks – almost invariably in my case, the Cajun chicken burger with bacon and cheese and we did so again last night. I also had 4 pints of San Miguel to wash it down. Four pints is hardly excessive (said he, flying in the face of current medical Nazism) and I hardly drink otherwise nowadays, unlike days of yore.

Anyway, when I got home again afterward, I was feeling a little full and probably didn’t help matters by having a restorative coffee before bed. The upshot is that I woke up this morning feeling a little squiffy. Not hung-over; I’m not so out of practice that four pints of lager will get me, but definitely ready to light a votive candle at the shrine of St Eno the Bilious. A bowl of Rice Krispies, a cup of coffee and a doze on the train seem to have me largely back to normal, but I confess to be looking forward to the end of today and the coming of the weekend (a weekend to be foreshortened by an hour as the clocks go forward!). Despite it only having been a three-day week for me, I am unaccountably tired and as I type, I feel the stirrings of the return of slight gastric distress in contradiction to previous assurances that I had recovered.

More coffee.

I think I shall apply to have that as my motto on a coat of arms.

Today we disappeared down to Brighton. It was originally supposed to be for the day, but ended up being for the afternoon. This time of year and when you are not about to invest large amounts of wedge in entertainment, an afternoon to see the sea and potter is about right.

Having walked down the street from the station, ellefurtle and I walked along the prom a whiles before going down on to the scree slope that passes for a beach along much of the south coast. Walking on loose pebbles is frankly knackering so we amused ourselves like five year olds and sat down preparatory to hurling stones at other stones. This entertained us for much longer than should really be admitted by two adults. We wandered over to the pier (the one still standing) and took a stroll around the comatose amusement area - it's a bit early in the year for much to be happening, but as at least one kiosk was open, we obtained four sticks of Brighton Rock: the real stuff with Brighton written through it, before wandering into The Lanes in search of a pub lunch, which we finally had at a splendid little hostelry called "The Cricketers".

One fish and chips, one chicken goujons and cheesy chips, plus two pints of San Miguel later, we were ready to explore The Lanes, which are a little bit like a gestalt version of Covent Garden as imagined by the Islington Set and placed in an English provincial town. They are also built on a Moebius Strip, so that you can pass the same place several times despite not obviously turning back on yourself. We discovered this by walking in what appeared to be a direction away from The Cricketers and past The Brighton Armory - a militaria antique shop. That was nice, but we somehow ended up back at our starting point and went past both places twice without obviously turning around. Luckily, by keeping the sea off to our left, we were able to break this loop by walking through what, if the amount of jewelry shops is any evidence, is actually downtown Antwerp (or Antwerpen or Anvers depending upon your linguistic preferences).

Truly I am a Prince of Amber.

Finally we made it back to the station by way of Model Zone where I purchased a Corgi 1960s comics version Batmobile, thus:

for the princely sum of £6.99 in their sale.

Back to London Bridge by 17.00 and back home by just after 18.00. A bit of a lie down to recharge the batteries and now off to find some further sustenance and maybe an episode of the X-Files.

I love lazy holidays.

Last night I got home very, very tired and was in bed at 12.30, which for me is almost unheard of. I’d been to the pub after work and had a few pints with pax_draconis. jfs showed up very briefly before going back to Ilford to provide moral support to westernind in her continuing struggle with evil property developer^tm at a planning meeting of the Borough Council. Hopefully that went well; maybe we’ll get the skinny on that when jfs comes along to the athenaeum club tonight for the games session.

We briefly discussed the latest arrangements for NWO, and agreed a couple of contingencies should certain potential players fail to respond to invites. We also looked at ways of accommodating other character needs in line with player availability; we’re a little less convinced of the reasons we’re doing that, but let it not be said that we do not at least try to accommodate everyone!

I fear that I am losing my tolerance for beer. I am rather hoping that it has more to do with the hot weather than anything else. Unlike when I was in my twenties, when I would go out four or five times a week, these days I can go weeks without visiting a pub, certainly in the summer. In the winter, of course, we have the quiz league, so Tuesday nights are beer night, but it is rare that I drink more than four pints, and almost never more than five, even at my thirstiest (I have never been able to process huge quantities of liquid, and I no longer touch spirits).

Whatever the cause, for the second week in succession, I found myself in a pub after work, and returning home feeling – and my powers of description fail me here - bleh.

The upshot of going to bed comparatively early, was that I woke up at five this morning, but managed to force myself back to sleep for a couple of hours. What’s the point of turning in early if you get no extra rest?

In the meantime, I have discovered another disadvantage of working in a steel and glass building. I have a portable radio here at the moment, complete with earphone (one of those old fashioned earplug stylee earphones that you shove in one ear and get glorious mono. Sadly, I can barely get a signal on medium wave, and Radio 5 Live does not transmit on FM. This means that my enjoyment of the third Ashes Test is limited to keeping track of the score on a pop-up on my PC, which fails to update automatically as it is supposed to, on account of the arthritic behaviour of the server today. I strongly suspect that someone somewhere is downloading the entirety of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or maybe using the network printers to create multiple copies of the unabridged Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I am tempted to look into the prospects of acquiring a cheap digital radio at lunchtime, but I suspect that the words cheap, digital and radio do not sit easily in the same sentence when arranged consecutively. We shall see. A colleague of mine opines that they work best by a window (as do I), so it might be a pointless endeavour anyway.

As I have to go to the bank and pay over my monthly tribute to the Great God Barclaycard (one of the more awesome and terrible of the credit deities), I may well investigate the mysteries of digital radio anyway.

It gets me out of the office.

To mark this entry precisely in time, England are 93-1 as I type. That remarkable bell-end, Strauss being the wicket to fall for a mighty six runs. Will he still be an opener in the fourth test? I hope not, unless he does something clever in the second innings.

Must awa’. More later, perhaps.

Edit Typing in word and then cutting and pasting into LJ really scews the LJ Tags over.

¹Proverbs 1:7; the cricketing edition.