Thursday 30th April

This is going to be a very short post (no cheering at the back, please) because there isn't much to add and the pressures of that which has no place here are such that time is limited.

Post-blog yesterday I got an invitation to the pub from one of the folk I've come to know from I-M.com. Fraser dropped me a text on the way home saying that he would be in Bar Tat (must get the punctuation right on that some day) and was I around? Home, hosed and fed, and with no appetite for watching TV or sitting at the PC, I got royal assent and made tracks down into town.

The pub was crowded and, true to form, he was there and holding forth to two folk I didn't recognise. These turned out to be guys he'd met only the previous week when in with another of the I-M crowd, but the conversation was lively and, as is always the case, apt to take a sudden turn to the left without warning. Did you know, for example, that the Bishop of Bradford used to work out his frustrations by attacking a bramble patch at the end of his garden with a machete, swearing all the time like a submariner with a bad tooth? I didn't, but do now.

The wife of one of these chaps said she thought she knew me from somewhere, but as she is an estate agent and our involvement with the housing market is six-plus years ago, she was either mistaken or has an exceptional memory. The yak-fest continued through the pub quiz and stopped only while the answers were being read out. Suffice to say that the "New Yorkers" - our team name chosen from the legend on my t-shirt - failed to trouble the scorers, but as many of the picture questions were concerned with 'celebrities', of which our collective knowledge was sadly incomplete, that's hardly surprising. Come to think of it, our general knowledge was a bit thin as well...

By this time I'd had enough beer and knew that getting home to bed (via the murderously steep hill out of town) was the best option, so I excused myself and left Fraser & co to it. The ferocious climb was completed in a personal best time and left me gasping for air (and with a pulse of 120 bpm) at the end of it. Lord knows what anyone who heard my graveyard rasps floating out of the darkness thought.