London’s Superlative Pubs

Further to my report of the summer's expedition, I present here my first list of my findings.

The First Irish Pub outside Ireland

Though a particular acquaintance of mine may be so boorish as to propose that more than half of the three hundred pubs I looked in on were different branches of “O’Neills”, pay such nonsense no heed. I endeavoured to circumvent chains of the same name and entered not a single “Slug and Lettuce”, “All Bar One” or “Pitcher and Piano”. It would be remiss of me to fail to concede that I did deign to sup in a single “O’Neills” but compensated for a perceived – and entirely mistaken – tendency to be less than original by stopping by “The Tipperary” on Fleet Street, the site of a pub since 1605 and an Irish one for more than three hundred years. Some nice panelling and mirrors, but why there weren’t Guinness-themed hats on everybody’s head, I still fail to comprehend.

London’s First (and only) Scottish Pub

Remaining with the Celtic theme, “The Rob Roy” near Edgware Road underground station displays a breadth of football memorabilia related to Scottish teams. Though the landlord was a jovial chap, the establishment had no beers of note and little to recommend it or Scottish pubs in general.

The Oldest Riverside Pub

Visible across the Thames from the friends’ house in Rotherhithe where I stayed for half of my time in London, Wapping’s “Prospect of Whitby” is a characterful 490-year-old destination with good ales and a noose hanging on the banks of the river to boot (“Hanging”  Judge Jeffries used to drink here). A haunt for artists and writers at various times, its modern claim to celebrity comprises Del Boy’s visit in an episode of OF&H.

London’s Most Beautiful Pub

There may be some competition for this accolade, but I must declare the “Warrington Hotel” in Maida Vale to be my champion. Ornate on a grand scale, if one is to close one’s eyes ever-so-slightly, one could believe one were in a Renaissance Ballroom.

London’s Best Real Ale Pub

The dingy “Bree Louise” in close proximity to Euston train station has been awarded CAMRA’s London Pub of the Year status on more than one occasion but as I was fortuitous enough - when staying in Kentish Town - to live around the corner from “The Pineapple”, I availed myself of its beer festival on consecutive evenings and supped a dozen brews. 

London’s Grottiest Pub

Whilst there may be other contenders from the three hundred pubs I visited for “most beautiful” status, “The Globe” on Lisson Grove wins this category peerlessly. Adjectives fail me.

Best Theme Pub

Though full of suits when I visited, “The Sherlock Holmes” on Northumberland Avenue wins in this category for its range of exhibits. My favourite was the Greene King “Shelock Holmes” Ale, though admittedly it tasted suspiciously like the Greene King “George Inn Ale” found in Borough.

Thrice one hundred public houses

After nineteen months of cultural enrichment travelling the world between late 2008 and mid-2010, I determined to ensure my return to the greatest city in the solar system™ did not result in immediate philistinism. To that end, I revisited a handful of the big galleries and some of the major museums as well as journeying to England’s great centres of learning in my twenty four weeks in the United Kingdom but it was my efforts as regards those smaller institutions of cultivation, the public houses (and the tasting of the beverages within), which may be judged – by others, naturally, for I would not presume to assert thus – to have reached the status of ‘art’.[1]

Ultimately, the one hundred and sixty seven days I remained in England occasioned the visitation of three hundred and fifteen such establishments. Fourteen lay outside the boundaries of Greater London and it is the other three hundred and one which constitute the pool from which I draw the observations and opinions that make up my next log entries. The reputable organisation CAMRA asserts that the capital maintains approximately five thousand seven hundred public houses but other sources count as many as seven thousand. I hope I will be allowed, therefore, to claim that my summer jaunts in the name of art and culture took me to somewhere in the region of five percent of all London pubs.

Sadly, it has been reported in the venerable Times of London that British public houses are becoming defunct at the rate of fifty two per week. For that reason it is appropriate before listing to mourn a paragon of ale houses, the “Black Horse” in Fitzrovia which served an impressive range (it was a Nicholson’s pub) when I visited on twentieth June but which will quench travellers’ thirst no more.

---

[1] For a final decision regarding this, please see also my entry on beers drunk in 2010.

Round up and away

After a dismal home performance against Scunthorpe, which we lost 2-0, it was even harder to convince myself to return to Vicarage Road on my birthday and final whole day in the UK for another year or so. Truth is though that this Watford Boy lost his passion for the matches a while before we left in 2008 and the sole reason for my continued attendance is a bit of time with my nephew.

Nevertheless, with the Hornets involved in a “thrilling” 3-2 away defeat (Portsmouth) and having beaten Ipswich at home in a game I did not get to (rain and broken bike stopped play), I was able to put aside the mauling at Derby and hope for a timely gift from the Golden Boys in the match against Nottingham Forest.

Jordan Mutch provided one after three minutes and my optimism held out another quarter of an hour before the Reds equalised. Another dull game finished all square but at least it was not as excruciating as the previous home match. A second “thrilling” 3-2 defeat (at Selhurst Park) since then has seen us slide into thirteenth and though the number may not bode well, most fans would take that as a final position, given a choice.

Eight hours ahead of GMT as I now am, many of the scores for the rest of the season will be looked up after a night’s sleep. This blog has become less a football diary and more a travel journal. Until the younger Watford Boy takes over the match reports, it will remain so. In the meantime, I cross my fingers for today’s trip to Turf Moor and hope for the fans’ sake that we can win a thriller again.

Sweet Dreams are made of (most of ) this

Starting a fortnight ago (2-0 at Bristol City), Watford won three games on the trot, including our biggest ever away victory (at Millwall's Den, 6-1) and then a 3-1 home defeat of Middlesbrough, Danny Graham latching on to a poor back pass to score after 17 seconds and give Hanna a great start to her first ever football game.

Last night, though, we were 3-0 down to Swansea (with Brendan Rodgers "Short, greedy bastard, you're just a...", Liam led) with three-quarters of the game gone and there seemed no way back as they outpassed us and outplayed us in the middle. Out of nothing, a Troy Deeney goal sparked a remarkable comeback from the 'Orns, that saw us score a second and have a 95th minute equaliser disallowed.

Though I have not been blogging much about the team's fortunes since my return I have been going and since we are in a very respectable 4th place after 9 matches, many fans feel that pre-season predictions of relegation were misplaced. Who am I to disagree?

You make your own meaning to life...

The best years of her life | Fond memories of blindfolded prisoners « Dimi’s notes

The best years of her life | Fond memories of blindfolded prisoners « Dimi’s notes

Top of the league

The season's first league game saw promotion hopefuls Norwich City host can-we-stay-up Watford and get spanked. The BBC may be reporting the first quarter of the game as dominated by the home team, but since the Horns were 2-0 up after 24 minutes, I have trouble concurring. Watching in a Marylebone pub with no volume except the banter of the Millwall fans behind me, I had to supply enough atmosphere for half a pub to care. Danny Graham helped, with two well-taken goals, but I thought John Eustace's 14th minute chest-and-half-volley effort was better, not least because he knew it made up for an earlier miss. Told to calm down after Adrian Marriappa should have put us 3-1 up during a Canaries spell of domination, I enjoyed milking our unexpected victory. Next Saturday, Adrian Boothroyd brings his Coventry side to the Vic and I go to my first Watford game for almost two years. It may not quite be like watching (in) Brazil, but I'm excited.

Why is Stonehenge not a henge?

Because its bank lies inside its ditch, as you can see in this picture.

UK Hung Parliament: a bit like sex, really

Nobody can know how much influence Lord Mandelson´s pre-election quip had on potential Liberal Democrat voters who did not want Etoryinans in power.

“if you flirt with Nick Clegg in these crucial Labour-Tory marginals, then you’re likely to wake up the next morning with David Cameron” he said.
“And let me assure you, that is a night you would come to regret. You would wake up thinking something had gone horribly wrong in your life.”

However, Nick seemed not to have paid heed and said he fancied David a bit more. The resulting political speed-dating made it clear that Gordon can not now qualify for the grand finale of  “Date or dump: who rules?”. If Nick is indeed “being wooed” by both parties as CNN report, then New Labour has offered to sweeten the morning after by removing Brown´s face from the pillow.

David Miliband, go on down!

Imagining Electoral Reform

I start a six-day trek to the Tayrona (or Kogi) culture´s “lost city” here in north Colombia today, which means returning when the results of the UK General Election are finally decided. Or rather, when the results of the 150 or so marginal seats are decided. The outcome in each of the other 500 constituencies is already a foregone conclusion.

The introduction of TV debates seems to have been the main catalyst for the increased popularity of Nick Clegg and hence the party he leads, the Liberal Democrats. This in turn means that a hung parliament is being discussed as a real possibility. Pessimistic in this regard, I fear that the Etoryians will get a working majority and see out a term (low expectations means anything else will be doubly delicious).

Despite the apparently increasing willingness of the electorate to use tactical voting to be more effective in our first-past-the-post system, I do not believe 2010 will be a watershed. Nevertheless, I am hoping the system will come close enough to breaking point in its disproportional representation of the defeated parties that binding promises will be made by politicians heeding the anger of disenfranchised voters. 

You may say I´m a dreamer, but I´m not the only one.

Survival of the just-fit-enough

Watford romped past Reading 3-0 on Saturday to ensure Championship survival in what every fan hopes was their nadir season. Danny Graham scored either side of a Heidar Helgusson left-footer. The Sheffield Wednesday v Crystal Palace match this Saturday will decide which of those two drops with Peterborough and Plymouth. Watford´s result at Coventry will be irrelevant for both teams.

As the manager and local paper have emphasised over and over, "survival" was all we hoped for this season as the mismanagement of the funds from an-always-going-to-be-one season in the Premiership with which this blog began left us worse off than if we had never won the single most lucrative game in world football. How the fuck does that work? Ask Graham Simpson.

Colleagues of mine who shared Friday drinks from the few years before I left London will know that I am an arrogant pedant who is too keen on the invitation “Wanna bet on it?”. My favourite win until recently was against a Russian friend who told us that she had been to the Kazakhstani capital. I won a couple of quid telling her that she hadn´t.

Watford´s guarantee of Championship football in 2010-11 along with a poor season for Oldham in League 1 means that I have won a two-and-a-half-year old wager with Luke that the Latics would (not) be in a higher league positon than the Hornets on 7th December 2010. I was sweating on it for a while but – good sport that he is – I received a congratulatory message from him following our victory.

Oh, and a hundred pounds is not to be sneezed at by someone who hasn´t had a full time job for two years.

It was all yellow...

I may have been at South America´s largest market (Otavalo, Ecuador) but despite the multi-hued blankets, belts, bags, bracelets and bowls, my mind was focussed on just one colour. 

In three weeks, Watford have lost two six-pointers (at Hillsborough and home to Palace) and drawn our other three games: two home points against Boro and Brom, one brought back from Deepdale. Three points in five is relegation form so today´s Vic victory against second-bottom Plymouth only brings temporary relief (whilst sealing Argyle´s fate). Our three main companions in the fight against ending twenty-second in the Championship (the two mentioned first, and Scunthorpe) all lost today. QPR, by beating Palace, are now probably safe on 51 points, barring some significant form-breaking results.

The bottom looks like this:

Team	Pld	GD	Pts	Fixtures
Watford	42	-10	48	QPR (a) Leicester (a) Reading (h) Coventry (a)
Scunthorpe	42	-24	47	Bristol C (h) Reading (h) Donc  (a) Forest (h)
Crystal Palace	43	-3	46	Derby (a) West Brom (h) Sheffield Wed (a)
Sheffield Wed	43	-19	45	Sheffield United (h) Cardiff (a) Palace (h)
Plymouth	43	-19	41
Peterborough	43	-28	31

Watford have three away games in their final four matches while Scunthorpe have three home ones out of four. Cystal Palace and Sheffield Wednesday each only have three matches left, with Palace travelling twice and Wednesday once. Palace are only where they are because of a 10-point administration deduction but it is already clear that the final relegation position will only be decided on the final day, when they travel to Sheffield. I am not going to make a prediction. I just hope my fingernails hold out. How do the words go? “For you I bleed myself dry”...

Libertadora del Libertador

Though it is said that you learn something new every day, most of my knowledge about the liberation of South America from Spanish colonial rule has been obtained by a sort of osmotic process over a year: statues and street names, obelisks and museums, artworks galore. I am at the point where I could recognise a silhouette of Sucre or the back of Bolivar (though the portraits of the latter by Julio Blanco (a good link to which I cannot find) were something different). 

Before noticing a museum two days ago (behind the Monastery of Santa Catlina, where she was raised after  her mother died a month after giving birth), the name of Doña Manuela Sáenz meant nothing to me, however. No feminist will be surprised to hear that the woman Bolivar called the “liberator of the liberator” (she is said to have saved her lover´s life on three occasions) had been airbrushed from history until recently. 

The tour round the museum (again, “no photos”, again, a lenient guide) was more of an attempt to insert her into the liberation story than a genuine reflection on her life (I had learned more from Wikipedia last night) but most of her belongings had been burned when she died a pauper´s death in Paita, Peru. We were told she was a brave woman, fearless: unfortunately there is little left to illustrate her heroism.

Bloody Quito

We had been warned that the Quito school of religious art tended towards the gory. Yesterday, we were guided around the Monastery of Santa Catalina, whose nun "inmates" have only one hour per day to talk to each other or watch TV,  and saw some particularly macabre examples.
There was the image of sheep drinking the blood of Christ from a trough as it poured from his wounds. Additionally, we were shown a painting of Christ skinless after flagellation, imaginatively called "Christ´s spine". I guess after seeing pictures such as these, even the nuns count their blessings.

¡Phew!

After a run of five without a win, which included the humiliation of giving soon-to-be-relegated Peterborough their first away win of the season (and the double over us since I last wrote about the Horns), Watford beat Ipswich at Vicarage Road on Tuesday to relieve a little of the fear of relegation that has deepened since I may have counted chickens at the end of 2009.

My nephew Joss will only have seen us win three times in 2010 (all home Tuesday night games, against Bristol City and Sheffield United too) but I haven´t had a text report from him now for ages. I think he needs some nagging. It also looks less likely that I will be back in the UK to shout on the Golden Boys before the end of the season.

Instead, I intend to compensate by going to see a match in Quito on Easter Sunday when the present league leaders from this beautiful colonial city take on second-placed Barcelona (de Guyaquil), who I will be supporting because their kit is the same colours as Watford´s (they have quite a name, too).

Ecuador´s Best Panama Hats

As I am sure you know, the "Panama" hat is from Ecuador, and Cuenca is the capital of hat-making. Today we were shown around Alberto Pulla´s workshop by the man himself, who has been featured in articles across the world.

Shrunken Heads

 

Forget the US thing for "shrinks", in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Shuar avenged murders by reducing the killer´s head to a tsantsa, the size of a tennis ball.

Peruvian Beers

Being vegetarian, I deprive myself of many of the culinary delights of the countries I visit, meaning, for example, that I missed out on roasted guinea pig in Peru. I do my best to compensate for this failure by trying every beer (and other new alcoholic drinks, come to that) I come across. To that end, I can report that I managed twenty brewed-in-Peru cervezas in my six months in the country, which ended Sunday.

The A-Z list is:

Anpay*

APU cerveza de coca

Arequipeña*

Barena

Club*

Cristal*

Cusqueña blonde*, malt, red, wheat

Franca*

Perkas*

Pilsen Callao*

Pilsen Polar

Quara

Real McCoy`s Amber Ale dark and light

San Juan

Trujillo*

Zenda*

The asterixed majority are same-samey bubbly lagers, the best of which may have been Club, the worst Perkas. Barena and San Juan were similar but had a Red-Stripe tang to them, a positive in my book. Cusqueña´s malt was too sweet for many but I found it and the targeted-at-women Quara to my liking, though Pilsen´s black beer, 

called Polar for some obscure reason, was my favourite. The coca-leaf beer is something to try yet not savour, though I would steer clear of Cusqueña´s “limited edition” red beer, if it is being marketed when you are in the country.

Is it a sun dog? Is it a parhelion? No, it´s a 22 degree halo.

Well, I never even knew such things existed before we got to Pimentel beach, north Peru, at noon. A bit of research later and I found out this rainbow round the sun (the pic doesn´t quite do the colour justice) is formed when light is refracted through hexagonal ice particles in thin high level clouds such as cirrostratus. Another "wow" on my long trip away.

Waterfall wonders

Last week we were in Chachapoyas and were told that the nearby Catarata Gocta was the thid highest  waterfall in the world. Naturally, we added it to our list of things to do. We have seen a fair few in the sixteen months we have been away, on walks in Australia and New Zealand, a visit to the fantastic Iguazu Falls as well as from buses throughout the Andes. I have been looking forward to seeing the world´s tallest, Kerepakupai-Merú (known since 1933 as Angel Falls), in Venezuela on this trip.

At the registration point for the falls was posted a Washington Post piece which stated that there was some disagreement about the status of Gocta, due to there not existing a universally recognized standard of waterfall measurement. It turns out that lots of factors need to be taken into consideration when considering what can even be defined as a waterfall (or what type of waterfall it can be defined as). Vertical height is one of those, slope is a second, volume a third. Finally, the question of whether non-bedrock cascades should be included in the measurement of a waterfall is an important and too-long-to-go-into-here element.

Wikipeda only deepened the confusion. On the waterfall page it said Cautley Spout in Cumbria was England´s highest. On Cautley Spout´s page, it said Gaping Gill in North Yorkshire falls a greater distance (but into a pothole). The waterfall page also names Gocta and another waterfall as the world´s third highest. Seems to me, I could do a better job of measuring them than that.

Anyway, further research suggests that Gocta is actually only the third highest waterfall in Peru. Catarata Yumbilla at 870m or 896m falls in four tiers, while the Three Sisters Waterfall has three tiers and reaches about 914m. The World Waterfall Database has Gocta at 16^th. Somehow, I don´t think this information is going to change the marketing strategy of the agencies around Chachapoyas´ Plaza de Armas.