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.  

getting the ball rolling.

I now have a till. I am more excited by this then I expect anybody else to be, but it underlines to me that this is actually going to start happening. We have been waiting so long to iron out difficulties with the contract that it feels a relief to begin the ball rolling. We have not signed yet, but I expect to do this next week sometime. There do not seem to be any more hurdles to the deal.

I took the Raleigh shopping today. She cycles like a dream. As long as your dream is of teeny tiny wheels and fat, low pressure tyres. The riding position is difficult to describe. It is a little similar to sitting on a bar stool, holding onto a glass on the bar, but moving along on scooter wheels. I did enjoy pootling along the promenade of Gloucester Road, past the cafes and bars. And yet we did get quite a few looks, although the bicycle many more than myself. I popped into Fred Baker’s, which was the unfortunate bike shop that is next to the Tesco store that hit all of the headlines in May this year. Old Fred himself came out and uncharacteristically was quite disparaging about my lovely machine, but I think he was just winding me up. He did give me some tips about attempting to take this bike up the hill to Clifton, but frankly it is the return journey that worries me the most. One of my earliest grown-up emotions was dislike for caliper brakes. I will take a nice photo of my bike tomorrow if the sun emerges.

On the way home, I went into the second hand store near my house and made two excellent purchases. The Casio till and an old looking chair for the pub. It shall have to be upholstered, but I think that it looks really nice. The till works, but has no manual. It tallies up fine and ‘fingers crossed’ it will be able to perform accurate X and Z readings. I’m hoping to be able to use it until we need something more versatile. It has Larry Nash's service sticker on already, which is handy as I have used him before.

I’m going to the Hillgrove tonight to play some records. I’m a rubbish dj so I hope it goes well. It’s a horrible cliché but the word eclectic ought to be sewn onto my dj hat. It’s the only way that I can play records. (Those are singles in the photo. The 28mm lens makes them appear a bit larger than they actually are.)

Beginning.

My friend, Chris is great. This evening he gave to me this excellent Raleigh bike. It is from the sixties or seventies, and it is his belated birthday present to me. I am really chuffed that Chris had managed to acquire the beauty from his housemate. It has been gathering dust in Chris’s small lounge, and every time I visited them, I always cast longing eyes onto it. Now that it is mine I am a very happy monkey. It needs a little work, but I rode it home from his with no problems except for the embarrassment that juddery and extremely squeaky brake pads will make. I did manage to slightly scare an elderly couple while shamefully cycling on the pavement actually very slowly behind them. Sorry.

So this is my new blog. It’s the first time that I have been tempted to actually attempt to bore the entire planet with many details of my daily life. I am promising to myself to try not to start posting every mundane event that occurs every two hours in my life.

The reason why I am starting a journal is because very soon I hope to agree a contract for a lengthy lease of a local, respected pub that has been vacant for 12 months. We need to spend a little time decorating and possibly converting sections of the building, and basically turning it into a working pub once again, starting mostly from scratch. There are no fixtures and fittings within the building to speak of and I do not have loads of money to spend, so this could make the next few months are of our lives interesting. Getting to this stage has been a long and at times arduous mission, but it does finally look like it shall happen. I am going to share and convey the experiences that my partner, H and myself are going to experience, and hopefully some people might find it interesting enough to follow.

The reason that I feel compelled to start the diary today rather than any other day is that I feel the great pub adventure has genuinely begun today with the acquirement of the bicycle. I want it to be a kind of pub bicycle. I can use it to initially commute, to advertise my venture, and to visit any suppliers that are not in Clifton or Totterdown