Gnu

It's a new moon.  Happy new moon everyone!

As for my state of mind at the moment, I'm all over the place.

Opened the pub yesterday...... closed the pub yesterday...... worked a shift at the pub yesterday...... couldn't sleep.....  Dawn started snoring..... the rain started pouring........ my back started hurting.......  restless night to the power of ten.

Today I have to open the pub..... close the pub, and make sure the new real ales are all tapped and ready to go for the weekend.... I think I'll tap the Martson's Pedigree tonight to put on the bar tomorrow and tap the Kelham Island on Friday night so it's ready to replace something at the weekend.  The new Copper Dragon will arrive Friday and that'll just follow itself on the bar when it runs off and the Leeds Pale, well, unless I get some stillage space, it'll have to wait.  I need a Bateman's XB drinker to walk through the door!

It's enough to keep me awake at night!

I eventually got round to making a lovely salad yesterday to take to the pub for my tea.....  I julienned carrots, diced peppers, boiled eggs, tore lettuce, chopped spring onions, sliced radishes, deseeded cucumber, and generally mixed it all together........ then promptly dropped it all on the kitchen floor!

If Jesus wept, he couldn't hold a candle to what I did!!

As we all know, the 8 second rule doth verily apply, and I scooped it up quickly, leaving the last few dog hair coated pieces for the sweeping brush.

Once I'd tipped some bacon bits (vegetarian ones of course) and Italian dressing over the top, you'd never know of the salad's close encounter of the linoleum kind!

And Lord, the salad was good!

Right.... time to get ready and get down the boozer for some opening up type antics..... a barsteward's work is never done!

(just got time to pay tribute to Brian at Tannu Tuva for reminding me how good Squeeze are - in homage, I've changed my music - go on have a go on the music player over there on the right hand side)

When Sunday

When Sundays go bad.

I looked, yesterday, for a series of searches of which I could select my usual eclectic mix, and expand upon them, in order to assist lost surfers in finding their perfect internet shaped wave.

Alas and alack.... in actual fact, a severe lack of searches have been completed in the last week, and for the first time in living history (or at least the last couple of weeks) there was not enough material for a Super Sunday Search blog entry.

Shame on you search engines of the interweb.  You know who you are!

So my weekend highlights have included:

A garlic pizza, which when opened (in the comfort of my own home/pyjamas) was revealed to be a combination of garlic and pineapple.

Line cleaning at the pub on Sunday morning - completed all on my own.... no help, no assistance..... no troubles.... everything tip top, ship shape and Bristol fashion.

Somebody ordered 11 pints of Leeds Pale Ale..... and the barrel ran empty after six!  Placated them with a further five pints of Batemans XB.

A bag full of new polo shirts (suitable for lounging and getting covered in beer) bought for me by the lovely Dawn.

My mum questioning the answers I supplied to her for her crossword..... on the basis that she couldn't understand how or why I would know that another name for a werewolf is a lycanthrope or that  "hydra" begins with an "H" and not with a" T"!

An order for twelve jagerbombs!

An order for twenty two raspberry sambucas!

A suitable (and cheap) lunch at Dirty Dicks in Halifax on Sunday afternoon with a couple of pints of rather nice ale.

A Chinese takeaway on Friday night that went a bit wrong by virtue of them not having what I ordered and then getting a free replacement dish instead.  Then similarly on Saturday lunch time, Dawn's ordered dish was not available and she was given a slightly inflated refund over her alternative choice.

I've just realised that I've eaten out all weekend.... and when I haven't eaten out, I've eaten takeaway.  Bad diet indeed!  A week of salads will surely be the penance.

Slurp, now for some Tour De France.

Feed a fever....

Somewhere deep at the back of my consciousness, I seem to remember that you're supposed to feed a fever but starve a cold!

I'm not sure where such a tale would come from or whether it has any relevance at all.

Feeling somewhat jaded (i.e. I'm actually dying, but we men don't like to go on about it too much) I decided to take advantage of a brace of fridges (we have a fridge each - myself and Dawn for reasons including: I keep maggots in my fridge for fishing; Dawn brought her fridge with her when she moved in; nobody touches stuff in my fridge cos everything in there usually actually needs cooking and can't be picked up and eaten) that were fairly stuffed with fresh fruit and vegetables.

I knuckled down and made a pan of stew, which included swede, runner beans, potato, onions, carrots and some quorn steak strips (which actually are not bad) and a packet mix of dumplings floating on top..... hearty to say the least.

Once the stew was on the simmer.....

I peeled and chopped and scraped and diced and squashed and spiced and whipped up a rather large pan full to the brim of vegetable curry which included apples, celery, onions, garlic, carrots, cauliflower, potato, sultanas and green beans (long green beans?  French?) and some spices in the form of ginger, turmeric and cayenne.

Once both pans were on the go......

Cracked on and made some fresh fruit salad out of a bunch of fruits that needed using up.... pears, oranges, pineapple, strawberries, and blueberries.

So.... going back to the old adage about feeding a fever and starving a cold..... I'm not actually sure what sort of ailment I'd put myself down as having.....  so I wouldn't know whether to feed it or starve it.....

One thing's for sure though..... I've made enough food to last me until the weekend and I'm pretty sure that it can only do me good!  I've got a belly full of stew.... I've had some fruit salad..... and in about an hour (just chance to watch one episode of Walking Dead).... I'll be away to my pit!

Na-night!

Life without meat

A long time ago, in a curry house not so far away.... I sat and ate a fine lamb curry.

The curry house - Sapnas on Venn Street in Huddersfield.

The time.... probably 3AM (eternally) and perhaps the year 1990 or thereabouts.

It was the last piece of meat that I ordered.

The next day I was vegan.... stopped buying wool, silk (not that I ever bought silk anything anyway), leather, milk, cheese, meat, eggs..... the list goes on.  The Friday big-shop went from being a pleasant 1 hour saunter through the local Tesco's to being a frantic four hour marathon of ingredient listings, E number translations and painful scrutinisation of lots of small print.

Retrospectively I tried to justify my decision to become vegan by applying the principles of karma and the concept of yin yang.... really it was just about me trying to balance the forces of good and bad in my life.... I was a pretty bad guy doing lots of bad things and I needed some sort of good thing to balance the scales.

For eight years I managed to avoid animal produce..... it was a harsh time and it was difficult to go on holiday anywhere or to eat out anywhere.  It was a DIY culture where everything had to be cooked from scratch at home and one which mainstream society had no clue about - times have changed since then and people are much more aware now.  It is not uncommon to walk into a pub and see items on their menus that are even labelled as "vegan" - this would never have happened in 1990.

The Vegan magazine was a helpful publication at the time, and you could, if you shopped around find a guesthouse with vegan catering, and I do remember vegan breaks in The Lakes, at Blackpool, and we even found a vegan restaurant on the island of Zakynthos (tucked away behind Greece's answer to Blackpool).

During a weekend break in Whitby, it was decided that I would start to eat fish again... probably 1998 or thereabouts, and what better place to do so than the famous Magpie restaurant on the harbour front.  I tucked into a fish supper of immense proportion for the first time in many years - and no doubt it was fried in beef dripping as well as is the Yorkshire wont.

And that's it.... I eat fish and seafood and I'm none too fussy if something contain gelatine.  Once I accidently picked up a slice of pizza that had meat on it and rather than waste it I ate it....  the Chinese takeaway once served me sweet and sour chicken instead of king prawn and I still ate it.....  I'm not fussy.

My choice is.....  I don't eat meat... that's it.... you can call me a half-arsed vegetarian.... a pescetarian.... a tree hugger.... call me what you want....

I'm NOT fussy!