Catching my breath

Hello - everything is different since last post.

Job

I have a new job that I really enjoy. I only have to work three days a week there. It is a brand agency that suffered a midlife crisis and is now trying to only do good things. I am doing their comms, so it is essentially an in-house role i.e. no dealing with clients. They are all nice people and sometimes a little dog comes to the office and I can play with it. The offices are 5mins away from my flat.

the street where I work

Football

My entire life since January 2 has been consumed by my involvement in a community buyout of the local football club. This has been worthwhile in many respects - I am now friends with an extremely famous British film director, for instance, and will soon get to meet a cult figure in football management at our prospectus launch event - but has clouded out everything else and created an enormous amount of stress, to the point of being physically debilitating, from worrying about the responsibilities. A doctor actually prescribed me beta-blockers to deal with late-night panic attacks - ever taken these? They literally slow down your heart and you can't feel your legs. However I have 'given notice' and will stop working for the bid Tuesday next. At this point I'll have time to really get myself on track.

potential new friend

Not that things are bad now, things are good, just a little bit day-to-day. I like a nice weekly routine and am building towards it. I work three days a week and yet don't seem to get much out of the spare time - haven't made sauerkraut for ages! Once the football thing is over I'll get back to work on the important stuff - sort out the tai chi (not going to the guy in Bristol anymore, it's too far), tapestry, brewing etc. I'll probably do more blogging.

Bath

It's a lovely town really. I've figured out a good circular walk that takes about an hour and half. I used to walk for hours each day in London and I can now scientifically confirm that it was keeping the weight off.

I like being closer to nature. I mean look at this picture. This is Lansdown Crescent, part of my walk. Those are SHEEP in the foreground. We have sheep just wandering around here.

The canal is great for walking as well. We're looking after our friends' houseboat from tomorrow until Thursday, pretty psyched. Then on Thursday we're going to the Royal Bath & West Show, which I predict will be fucking sick.

Cider

Without anyone really encouraging me, without having read about it in the Guardian or on a cool website, I have ended up actually genuinely preferring scrumpy farmhouse cider ('real cider' in CAMRA parlance) to normal cider brands like Thatchers or Stowford Press. The gateway was Honey's Midford Cider, which is made near my mum's house. It had a clean design on the pump clip and had an 'accessible' taste. It also made me feel like I was on drugs - specifically, codeine, which I starting taking in 2010 after getting really bad back pain, and then used the leftover tablets to treat hangovers. It's a warm, fuzzy, "everything is right in the world" feeling. 

Then my mate Rory, who lives in a camper van, came to live in the West Country for a bit. He has no money so we got into a routine of getting into the camper van on a Friday night, driving to a farm shop and buying loads of cider, poured into plastic milk bottles straight from the barrel. We would then park up in some field or another and drink cider, cook farm shop sausages and play charades. I should really do a whole post about Rory and his camper van, it's a thing of beauty. We're camping at Bath & West in it. If you have instagram look up 'seasidechancer' and follow his adventures, I'm in a lot of them.

But anyway the interesting point is that different ciders affect you in different ways. There is a notorious local scrumpy called "Cheddar Valley" that makes people violent. We also found from experience that "Black Rat" cider makes you a bit 'chopsy' as we say here - not violent, but a bit snappy and wired - and then gives you not just a hangover but also a full-blown comedown that can last up to two days. I can however recommend "Black Bat" cider which puts you in a cheerful mood, with little after effects. The hangovers don't tend to be too bad, possibly because of the lack of preservatives. I mean this is folk science here, this entire paragraph is probably bollocks but, you know, 'knowledges' and all that.

I don't know who these people are, this is just a generic shot of the sort of farm shop we go to. You can see the plastic bottles stacked by the barrels. I have actually tried the "Kingston Black" cider on the far right barrel. You can really taste the peel in that one.

I was in the Bell Inn on my own on a Sunday (Jess works on Sundays) and I tried to buy a pint of normal cider. The barmaid looked me up and down and asked me if I liked real cider - they had some in the back. People can actually tell that I like scrumpy just by looking at me.