In The Dungeon

It’s my birthday today and it turns out to be just about perfect. It helps that the Birthday Gods schedule it on a Saturday this year. It's always good when you don’t have to spend the majority of your big day behind a desk.

There’s no football match and I don’t schedule a dog show, so I get to spend it all in the company of an attractive young woman. She even skips this morning’s Park Run, although this is more due to a nagging ankle injury than out of devotion to my birthday.

The dogs still insist on doing the park, but you can’t have everything, and they do let us have a long lie-in first. Then we do a very un-celebratory gym session because I need to get one in before the end of the month if I’m going to get my cash back at year end.

I mainly do the treadmill, 5 whole k without getting injured, so that’s promising and I also do some leg weights.

Back home L makes me a cake amid cries of ‘cake, you can't not have cake, can you?’

In the evening we head into Nottingham and hang out in Brewdog for a while. The beer range is a little down on what it usually is but one of the barmaids makes up for this by, clearly catching my birthday vibes, coming to our table to refill our glasses. So we don't even have to get up to go to the bar.

Then we head to Iberico Tapas for a meal in the dungeon below the Galleries of Justice. We were going to go there for a friend’s birthday last year until he found out it was underground which didn’t go well with his aversion of anything subterranean. It sounded great to us though and we’re vowed to go there ever since.

We are sat at a pillar in the bar as the restaurant is fully booked. It’s a popular place. It’s also in the Michelin Guide and there are no prices on their website... e.g. it’s not going to be cheap. Apparently not only is it in the Michelin Guide, it’s one of only 137 restaurants nationwide with a Bib Gourmand, whatever that is, and the only one in Nottinghamshire... e.g. it’s going to be really expensive.

Apparently the bib denotes ‘good cuisine at a reasonable price’ but yes, it's still pretty expensive.

Although that may be because we pigged out a touch. After a starter, we had five tapas dishes to share between the two of us. Then three more for dessert because we didn’t fancy anything sweet. Then there was the rather nice 6.4% Alhambra 1925 Reserva beer, basically San Miguel with balls and the fact L was hitting the Spanish Sherry.

All rather nice though. We’ll be back.

(Saturday 27^th April)