Beer Compurgation

If we learn one thing from our time in various states of social restriction, that many incorrectly keep referring to as lockdown, it is that we will learn absolutely nothing. Now is a time when we could as a population begin to sit back, relax and listen to each individual birdsong by an open window, trying to distinguish between the call of a goldfinch and a chaffinch.  Instead we will spend the 23 hours a day we are painfully awake flitting between social media and 24hr news channels, absorbing each and every speculative scrap of claptrap, to give us something else to talk about between checking Facebook again and opening more gin.  For me, it is the “updates” on pub reopenings and the conclusion of the football season. The latter involves me glancing at fictitious articles written by increasingly desperate sports reporters, fed to me through a WhatsApp group comprised mostly of Manchester United fans; Manchester United fans who are happy with their own cl...

Recently, and partly due to the demise of Bury FC , I’ve decided to spend the odd spare Saturday I have throughout the football season going to watch a local (for now) football team and take in some of the pubs and bars around the towns and stadiums in which they reside. The key to showing your age is to bewail how fast the time goes, so allow me to indulge in this nonsense. I’m writing this post on the 30 th March 2020, exactly three years to the day that I previewed this initial guide/travel companion to my first round trip of Glossop . Pubs included in that post had been visited in 2016. The idea that it was so many years ago was a surprise to me, even though I am fairly certain time is still functioning in its regular form. I spend a lot of time in and around Glossop nowadays, mostly because – spoiler alert – I live in close proximity to it. Sometimes I even wrongly refer to the area as a whole as Glossopdale and suggest I live there, more to annoy the prou...

As the third pint poured and the time ticked past 5, the guilt began to set in. The familiar spot on the bar represented a tainted area, surrounded by metaphorical barrier tape marking out the required quarantine. This one was to be the last. Or maybe the next one. Maybe they’ll be time for one more after that. But then it should be time to do the right thing. Then the decision was made for everybody anyway. In one announcement, the social diary was wiped away, like a cloth to a whiteboard. The decision as to whether to have a pint after work. The decision  as to where to meet a friend on a Thursday evening. The decision as to how to spend a weekend. Gone. Taken for us. The reasoning was sensible and the decision the correct one, but whilst the supermarket shelves emptied the hollowness set in. As people cried solidarity the walls began to soften. There were comments near criticising anybody saddened by the turn of events –  “you can go a few ...

Outside of my beer hobby, my day job involves managing a small company in a boring sector. Without going into detail of the work, it is in an industry that relies on business to business relationships and standard 30 day payment credit terms; like the vast majority of British business and industry. In an idyllic world there would be nothing more to say on this matter. As a company we pride ourselves on being excellent payers to suppliers and we will bend over backwards to help our clients who are too. But this business utopia doesn’t exist and, as such, the accounts department spend many wasted hours chasing payments, sending copy invoices and trying to work action plans with people. Once a month we’ll compile the “on-stop” list of clients we are no longer to do business with. Some will eventually pay. Some will fold, leaving us to scrape around 15% of what is owed through the administrators. On larger orders, several industries maybe involved with the end user, m...