More stuff.

Finally the sun has emerged long enough for me to take a properer photograph of my new bike. Here she is taking in the sun outside our house in Cotham. Research tells me that it is a Raleigh RSW 16. They were Raleigh’s answer to the Moulton range of cycles which were first released in 1962. My bike has 68 stamped on the Sturmy Archer rear hub, which suggests it is a 1968 model, just after Raleigh bought out the Moulton company outright. The rear tyre seems to be an original, which makes it possibly forty three years old. As I am such a shameless self publicist, I am thinking of using this vintage machine to advertise the pub venture, namely getting ,’The Bag of Nails’ painted onto both sides of the frame. The frame has already been badly painted once, so I would not be ruining anything original. This might well help advertise the pub, because I do already get a lot of looks as I cycle around the city. Sacrilege, shameless opportunism, or just the sign of an inflated ego? You tell me. Do please comment and let me know your thoughts.  

On Saturday evening, I briefly went to Glostonbury. This is the wittily named annual festival of the Golden Lion pub, on Gloucester road. You can see what they did there. It’s a great pub actually and one that I ought to visit much more. The range of ales is limited but fine, with Gem and Butcombe Gold always available, but this pub promotes itself as more of a music pub. This is not that surprising as the same bloke who has this pub also has the famous Old Duke on Kings Street, named after Duke Ellington, I believe. Anyhow you can see how busy the Lion was on Saturday evening. While we were there, they were playing what I would call electro-dub very loudly, shaking out the neighbourhood. Incidentally, the building to the right in the picture is Horfield Nick, which is where Paul Gadd served his all too short sentence for being a dirty, dirty bastard. It must be mental torture for some of the inmates, being able to hear banging music and the sounds of people getting pissed at times. But at least they don't have to share their cells with pervy Gary Glitter any more. 

Later in the evening, I visited various excellent pubs in the centre of the town, and at the end we arrived at The Bridge, ran by my friends Greg and Simon. A tiny pub that used to be within the estate of Bath Ales, it also has a record player and shelves full of LP’s and singles. Anyhow, it seems that they are trimming their collection down, and had a few Ikea bags of records they were giving away. Good for me because I have a psychotic need to take home and play records. I took home around ten 12”’s including this fine Jansch / Renbourne / sampler and thirty odd assorted singles. Some of the singles are excellent an I’m looking forward to drunkenly playing them too loudly in the pub, after hours. Anyhow Phoebe is guarding the records in our porch as you can see here.