Saturday 24 January 2015

A Weekend Tinged with Sadness.

I spent last weekend at Llangrannog, Cardiganshire, with my niece, her husband, three dogs, two cats, three horses and a donkey.

     We were celebrating the birthday of my late brother, who would have been 89 this year and who might even have been there with us if he had taken a little more exercise and a little less Famous Grouse. The tight sod also failed to make provision for these gatherings when he ordered his affairs, so we spent the weekend in the Ship Inn and the Pentre Arms, entirely at our own expense.

The Pentre and the Ship are both extremely civilised hostelries with sensibly flexible opening hours and one can while away a whole day there if one has a mind. Both offer excellent real ales and the Ship, as I remember, once served wine in three glass sizes, the largest being ‘Oh Go On Then’.


The Ship Inn. Llangrannog
All day pub drinking is all very well, but best not indulged in if one has already downed a half bottle of red over lunch and follows it up with another half bottle over dinner as I did. Later, my attempt to access the bathroom, two steps before I got to the top of the stairs, resulted in unplanned contact with the landing carpet  and persuaded me that my days of serious carousing were over, so it was with some sadness that I later announced my permanent retirement from all day drinking.

This life-changing decision forced me to reflect on my long past bacchanalian adventures; adventures  that, if undertaken by anyone else, would have been regarded as a shameful catalogue of drunken degeneracy, rather than the youthful exuberance and (mostly) jolly good fun that they really were. It was a difficult choice, but one really has to know when to quit
The Pentre Arms, Llangrannog.


I am of course, left with a whole lifetimes memories. All night parties, some of which carried on to include a whole Bank Holiday weekend; people paddling in my fishpond on Christmas Eve, much to the distress of the neighbours: prowling Malvern YHA in the early hours of a winters morning in the vain search for a loo, and perhaps, most nostalgic of all, after a dreadful session in the Cabaret Andalus mislaying myself, along with three comrades, on a Baghdad traffic island to be eventually rescued and escorted back to the YMCA by a kindly local.

I could write a book, but no bugger would publish it, anymore than they publish anything else I write.