ANCHOR STEAM

A few years ago, we were lucky enough to go on a tour of the Anchor Steam brewery in San Francisco and, I'll have to admit, got more than a little squiffy whilst chugging down the half dozen free samples dished out at the end of the tour, as we were reflecting upon the exciting tale of the live yeast used to brew their fine beers and porters and how it rather excitingly dates back to the old Wild west.

After coming home, we found that, for a while at least, bottles of it would be sold at a local supermarket of our acquaintance and we would pick up a couple of bottles to knock back at the weekend, whilst the familiar flavour transported us away from the everyday drudgery and back to more pleasant memories of holidays spent under bright blue skies, and sitting in one or two of the occasional bars and restaurants which nestle on the waterfront.

After a few years, however, because our supermarkets can be fickle creatures, those tasty bottles vanished from their shelves, and we were left without this option to add to our shopping cart, and we slowly got out of the habit, although we have continued to cast a hopeful eye in the direction of the "Beers of the World" whenever we have been passing, usually to no avail.

However, a few weeks ago, the Beloved was in town and found that the bar that she was in would sell bottles to customers to take away, and she bought a couple and brought them home for me, although, as they seem like such a rare and precious commodity, and not one to be wasted, they have lurked in the fridge ever since, waiting for that "special moment" to come when we could crack them open and savour that rather pleasant amber fluid.

Of course, there are various arguments to be made about living for the now, and not for a tomorrow which may never come, and if you save that bottle for a "special" occasion, you may never get to drink it, and I'm not going to argue the opposite view on any of that.

You may last another half century, or get hit by a bus tomorrow, but it's probably best to have plans in place for both.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that, when the Beloved left me alone for a couple of days recently, when I was sitting alone with my "lonely man" meal and a DVD Box Set spinning away in the player, I decided to crack open one of those "special" bottles - just the one - pour it into a glass, and drink it with my dinner.

And, you know what, it tasted mighty fine, and it was absolutely the correct thing to have done.

Cheers!

DRINK ME!

Just a quick one today because there’s something that I wanted to share. I’ll grant you that, as subjects go,  it’s hardly a very interesting one, and as images go, it’s something that many of you will already be familiar with if you’ve left the house over the past few weeks in dear old Cool Britannia, but what the heck, I kind of liked it, so I thought that I’d “fess up” to the fact, as “da kidz” probably never say…

I’ve just read that first paragraph back and, apart from an obvious failed attempt at being glib, (something I’ve seldom succeeded at), and a ridiculous attempt to use a middle-aged man’s ridiculous notion of what “the language of the streets” might be, there’s that over-optimistic use of the word “many” to describe you, my dear reader, which is, of course, bordering upon the absurd. As we all know, it’s only you and me, my precious, and even if both of us are ever in the same room, we’re hardly likely to ever be going to be thought of as a “crowd...”

But here I am, digressing again, for no good reason other than it gives a lie to that notion of brevity I suggested at the top of the page. Instead I have once again indulged myself in flim-flam and obfuscation and a general air of going around the houses and straying from the path of what could only be considered as being the point.

However, and by way of attempting, however feebly, to come to something at least approaching that very point of which I speak, I was indeed going around the houses when I first noticed the billboard that is, ultimately, our topic for discussion today.

It’s not often that an advertising campaign impresses me any more. After all these years of rotting away on this sad little planet, I tend to think that I’ve pretty much seen everything and that everything else is likely to be a bit of a rehash of something else that somebody did once before, sometimes much better.

So, I was rather surprised when I was driving around a few weeks ago to see a billboard with a poster on it that I actually quite liked, which formed part of the latest campaign for a certain brand of what can only be described as “lager”, a noxious pale golden brew of dubious content that seems to be enjoyed by more than a few of my fellow countrymen and women, usually served chilled.

It’s not that I drink the stuff myself, you understand, and I’m hardly likely to be persuaded otherwise by a bloody great poster overlooking the road, but I did rather like the way they had combined the product with a lager coloured version of the nation’s flag to tie it all together with the country’s expectation of a long, hot summer of parties and sport.

Fat (as they say) chance…! (The long and hot part, anyway. The sport, unfortunately, remains with us whether we like it or not…).

It’s not, I’ll grant you, the most original of ideas, but I did rather like the execution of it. It had a subtlety that I rather admired and wouldn’t normally expect from that particular company and, you know, I just rather liked the image, and, because I had absolutely nothing else I could think of to share with you today, I thought that I would tell you so. I do know, however, that by merely talking about a “grown-up” thing like an alcoholic drink, I might very well be breaking the vow that I made when setting up these tales of Lesser Blogfordshire, that I wouldn’t include “adult content” but I’m hoping that you’ll forgive me, just this once. After all, this is strictly between you and me, isn’t it...?

Feeling a bit thirsty now… I wonder why that is…?

RIVERSIDE SPECIAL

One of the things that kept me alive when I was a student was a meal that used to be known as a “Riverside Special” which used to be served at the “Riverside Tavern” which was the pub just across the road from the Art School building where I spent at least part of my days for three years, especially after the Institution I was attending instigated a mandatory daily signing-in policy which was probably the final nail in the coffin of the laissez-faire attitude to Art Schools from the 1950s and 1960s and which probably consigned all future generations of free thinking creatives to have to spend their lives being office workers after all.

Those politicians of the 1980s, eh…? They’ve given us so much to be “grateful” for…

Of course, this was in the days when students like me could still afford to eat, and not only that, eat reasonably well, in actual eateries where “real” people ate, if, that is, you were careful in what you chose from the menu. We did, after all, still have things like “grants” in those days, which, if you were canny enough, there was still a vague chance you could actually keep alive on.

Choosing to eat across the road at the pub was mostly done in order to escape from the dubious culinary delights of the canteen run by the enigmatic “Reg” whose canteen was very unlike the refectories on other campuses about the town as he seemed rather averse to producing any food that seemed remotely edible. Even his tea seemed rather suspect, to be honest, with a filmy surface that seemed to dance around with a multitude of oily colours which excited a lot of the students of “Fine Arts” to almost the same degree (if you’ll pardon the pun) as it disgusted me.

I still drank an awful lot of it, though.

Mind you, come to think of it, those “Fine Arts” students didn’t seem to mind his food all that much either, judging by the way they used to queue up for it and wolf it down, so maybe that tells you an awful lot about the “abstract” minds of the fine artist as opposed to the more “concrete” thinking of the graphic designers, if you want to believe in that sort of thing.

Actually, there might be something in that…

Damn! I wish that I’d known about things like “Oxbridge” back then and that it would have been perfectly acceptable to study something like English. Not that I’d have got in, of course, but it would have been nice to know that I could have tried…

I was reminded of all this recently when I had already eaten the ham sandwich I had made for my lunch and one of m’colleagues suggested that they might go off to the chippy to get their own lunch. A “Riverside Special” was precisely that combination; A Ham Muffin with chips, for less than two quid (although adding a beer tended to price it up a bit), and the memory and the taste of that particular combination came flooding back. Incidentally, a “Tavern Special” (do you see what they did with the name there…?) replaced the ham with a sausage for exactly the same price, and was much more welcome on chilly days.

Ah yes, the “Riverside Tavern”, where I also learned to combine lager and cider into a frothy mess that no-one else would touch; where you could get an orange-coloured drink known as a “Purple Nasty” because of the colour it became when it returned later on; where I first encountered the “Depth Charge” a drink within a drink; and where a girl once apparently did something quite dreadful after she borrowed my thin white tie, and, although I did get the tie back, nobody ever told me what it was that she had done...

Another mealtime favourite was a ham and cheese toastie from “Brown’s”, a coffee shop which, despite it being a bit of a trek in comparison,  I used frequent with some of my very good friends when we wanted to escape from the hurly burly of Art School life.

Those windows wouldn’t look through themselves, you know…

Everyone I knew back then seemed to have eating habits that could be considered very peculiar in one way or another, I recall. Those of us living on campus used to get our breakfast thrown in with the cost of the rent, and more than one of m’fellows used to pile up as much as they could at that point of the day and basically live off that for twenty-four hours. There was definitely one chap who lived off that option, supplemented by cereals for his other meals if he got hungry, for the entire three years.

Three years of basically just eating breakfast…

I suppose he’ll have to spend his fifties eating desserts.

Another acquaintance had a three-weekly cycle of meals that cost him just over a pound a week, and he always ended each term with a full bank balance and was therefore able to go out and buy guitars and LPs and suchlike. He would go to the market and buy a bag of potatoes that cost about 20p, and four days worth of either faggots, fish cakes or pasties, all of which could be got in quantities of “four for a pound”.

It’s strange how what you expect from your food, as well as your actual taste, changes with the years. Back in those days, I hadn’t yet had my eyes opened to much beyond the limitations of what my mother had served up, so even curries and pizzas were a bit of an exotic unknown to me then.

Nowadays, my horizons (as well as my waistline) seem far broader, but I couldn’t half go one of those “Riverside Specials” right now.