Any Port On A Storm

At work we have to provide support to our customers until 4pm on Christmas Eve, therefore we don’t get given the day off. So I book holiday for the afternoon so that I can meet L, her parents and Daughter at Seven, which is also on Pride Park, for lunch. The first problem is parking, it’s packed.

Finally I find somewhere and go inside. It’s quite pleasant although I’m not sure the pub singer was really necessary but I don’t disapprove. It’s better than a tape of Christmas ‘classics’.

L says she hopes they're still serving the champagne breakfast. Personally I hope not. Have you seen the price of it... The food we do have is very good and they even have a local real ale from the Derby Brewing Company.

Christmas Eve is still my favourite day of the year and this kicks it off nicely. Then the problem with the evening part is that these days you have to work quite hard to make it as good as it once was now that most of the city centre shuts at 6pm. So you can’t recreate the nightclub part any longer but we’re probably all too old for that sort of thing anyway.

We get one of the last buses in to Nottingham before they stop running. We have a drink in the Overdraught who we already know are planning to close at 9pm but we’ve barely sat down when they start talking about closing earlier. After only a couple of halves of their ‘craft’ beer they chuck us out not long after 8pm. Not much festive spirit there.

So we decamp to the Blue Monkey where they are planning their curfew at 10pm. We do at least get chance to have a more relaxed drink here, in fact I manage a couple of pints and then we contemplate finishing off at the Borlase which always seems to stay open.

However, instead we have an invite to meet Daughter, so we get the only bus still running, the Indigo, to the Rose & Crown near QMC where she is being festive with her friends. Us two gatecrashing their meetup or them gatecrashing ours has become a bit of an annual tradition.

Credit to the Rose & Crown who also don’t appear to be planning on closing early. It’s far from being a great pub but any port in a storm as they say.

(Monday 24^th December)

Champagne Breakfast

Now there’s some sort of wedding thing going on today, which I didn’t intend to get involved in at all. It’s nothing personal, I don’t really like weddings full stop, which is probably one of the reasons why I’ve yet to have one of my own.

I think it was the incessant media coverage that swayed me in the end, maybe the incessant ‘how to avoid the wedding' coverage. So I thought I’d rebel against the rebellion and watch it. Those folk complaining about having to miss their usual Jeremy Kyle fix should be at work anyway, as given their opinions, taking the bank holiday off would have made them a bit of a hypocrite.

Or perhaps it was L’s champagne breakfast that swung it. Which sadly wasn’t served in bed, so I had to get up for it and once up, watch the wedding perhaps. Eggs, bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes and croissants, all with champagne. Which sounds a bit like breakfast, dinner and tea all rolled into one. It should probably have been something posher but he is marrying a commoner.

The service was dull of course but apparently the dress was alright, so I’m told and the brides sister's rear end was better than alright, so I’m told. I just enjoyed the people watching, which was fascinating.

So Will mate, you've survived the university partying, the drink, the women, the see-through dresses, eight years of ‘living in sin’ and now you're married, so they'll be expecting you to knock out a few kids but no, you'll be getting a collie next. Right?

(Friday 29th April)