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These last two weeks have been really strange… it’s been a fortnight of catching up with old friends - and I mean OLD friends: friends I haven’t seen since school! First my dear friend Robbie came to stay. Robbie is part of my family and I love him with all my heart. When he left I cried like I haven’t cried in years. He’s gorgeous although a little timid. Which delighted Felix The Great no end as he thundered around the house causing earth tremors in neighbouring countries while Robbie looked politely uncomfortable! But for some reason the two of them got along really well - it’s like kids can pick the people who are least comfortable with children and then make them their favourite. He also ended up calling Robbie “Doff” for no apparent reason…

Then I met up with my school friend Vanessa whom I haven’t seen in 10 years. Fuck that makes me feel old! But when I saw her - she looked just the same! It was good to see her again - didn’t realise how much I missed her and her almond eyes and her inability to sit still and do one thing for any longer than 10 minutes (thanks for the indigestion Ness!)…

While I was out with her we dropped into the Quarry for a drink and I GOT ASKED FOR ID!!! I am 28 years and 9 months old! HAHAHAHA! I told the dear little bar girl that she would laugh when she saw my birthdate, she didn’t but she looked embarrassed!

Must have been mighty dark in that bar I think…

And then the real surprise happened on Sunday. We went to see The Cat Empire at Moorilla and it was a SENSATIONAL day! Absolutely gorgeous weather, great music, dear friends and MOO BREW!!! Ah such perfection…

So I was gradually getting drunk and sunstruck when someone sort of “hovered” up to me and said “Jemma? I THOUGHT it was you!” and it was my old friend Adam from school whom I haven’t seen in at least 12 or 15 years! I nearly died! It was so good to see him again and meet his lovely fiancee Coby. They’re a great couple and I drunkenly invited them back to our place to drink our beer… which they did!

What a day - I drank Moo Brew for 6 hours and Corona’s for another 6… reminisced with Adam, slurred to Coby, laughed and had a great time!

Impromptu drinking at its finest!

That’s all for today.

xxx

We went out on Saturday night with friends to have tappas which was really lovely - although I was burping paint stripper for most of the night. The salt! The garlic! Oh my - what a great meal! Chorizo, mushrooms in garlic sauce, octopus, chilli prawns and probably heaps more but they were the main offenders I think - at least they were the ones that were seeping pure garlic out of my pores 12 hours later.

And what better accompaniment to this vibrant explosion of flavour than Spanish beer? There were two on offer: Estrella Damm and Mahou, so the two laydees sampled the Estrella (women - be damned!!!) and the men-folk supped on the Mahou.

I think myself and my laydee-friend felt that we had hit the jackpot with our Estrellas, while the boys seemed non-plussed with the Mahou. On one hand the Estrella was crisp, gentle, inoffensive, and a typical lager style beer which complimented the intense food beautifully and on the other, the Mahou was an intriguing flavour. One that might be best sampled alone - so the true nature of the beer can shine. As you would imagine it was totally over-shadowed by the food so it was nearly impossible to review it accurately. Hell - I could barely feel my tongue after dinner - I could have been drinking drain cleaner and i wouldn’t have noticed, God knows I was belching it. Heaven help the bar staff at the pubs we attended post-tappas - poor bastards!

However, I really felt that the beer was most refreshing and I can’t wait to try both beers again - except maybe without the first two layers of my tongue missing this time - because I really think each of them has something beautiful to offer in the wonderful world of import beer.

Also would the record please show that my husband who normally has full immunity to hangovers suffered the Headache from Hell for the whole of the next day as he had indulged in a bottle of wine with the other two…. while I stuck to beer the whole night and mircaulously rose at 6:30 to tend to one nausiatingly chirpy 17 month old without a hint of of the Dry Horrors!

Hahaha! That’s Right! I WIN!!!!

You know I’m a Cascade girl right? I mean, I’m totally one eyed about it - Cascade Draught is my absolute favourite beer on the planet.

Well, I have some deeply unsettling news for you….

Our last slab was Boags. At my request. I know, please don’t abandon me - I made a mistake ok? Everyone has had a moment of passion where they do something rash, something emotional and that was mine.

It all started because of a bad experience we had at the Cascade Brewery Visitor Centre on Father’s Day. I won’t go into it in detail but it was basically a mish-mash of incompetance, misinformation and very poor customer service and it resulted in us walking out on our booking. I was so mad. I am usually a very easy going patron - I don’t send meals back to the kitchen, I ALWAYS thank the staff and tell them it was lovely even if it wasn’t and I HATE to make a scene. So you can see that the experience must have been pretty bad for us to leave without even eating.

So I got so lively about it all that I decided to switch brewers and turn to my arch nemesis Boags. My reasoning was that we drink so many slabs of Cascade a week that gradually over a year the brewery would damn well miss our custom.

Once I sobered up and began thinking rationally again I realised that this was a preposterous form of protest and that the only person suffering would be me because I was drinking crappy Boags. We bought a slab of The Northern Beer anyway - and drank it - but I didn’t like it. Even while I felt moderately smug about our purchase, the smugness and satisfaction quickly evaporated every time I had to actually drink one.

So the moral of this story is: your favourite brewery can do whatever they like - they can even employ an entire workforce of full-frontal-lobotomised monkeys, (and I think a certain Visitor Centre actually does), and there’s not a darn thing you can do about it because they make fucking good beer.

On the weekend I did a funny thing…. I flew 3000kms north to regional Queensland just to surprise my dear mum for her birthday. It was 7 hours worth of travelling. 7 hours of delays. 7 hours of avoiding all forms of liquid lest I should need to use that vacuum-sealed suction-cap they try to pass off as an aircraft toilet. And finally, 7 hours of trying to avoid the lolling head of my fellow passenger as she dozed, completely oblivious to the fact that she was becoming increasingly and uncomfortably intimate with me.

And she had bad breath. Poo breath. I personally believe that she was was put together upside down and hiding somewhere beneath her jeans and between her butt-cheeks is a perfectly formed mouth.

So you can see that by the time a reached my destination I was not only horribly dehydrated but also horribly sober. It’s ok. I found an Irish Pub called Dicey’s. They had Guinness on tap.

In order for you to truly understand my delight you’ve got to have have a brief outline of this town. It’s an industry town, so basically it exists to employ workers to refine aluminium and oil, make cement, toxic chemicals and other things that are too messy/dangerous/ugly for the rest of Australia to deal with. The people that live and work here work damned hard and they party hard. It’s honest. It’s down-to-earth. It’s naive and it’s corrupted all in one. It’s certainly not a place where a woman such as myself who lacks both the ability to swear like a man and look like one would drink alone. And yet, an hour and a half after stepping off my odourous flight that’s exactly what I found myself doing.

I was curled up in a cute leather lounge in a massive, dimly-lit pub drinking Guinness and reading Shakespeare by Bill Bryson. It was like I had stumbled across a little oasis in the middle of desert that knew no full strength beer. Hmm, this is sounding just a bit too refined…. I should mention that at this time there were four other patrons sharing the pub with me who insisted on shouting Fuck to each other instead of using actual words. I have no idea how one knew what the other was saying - but somehow they did.

Aside from the conversation being conducted entirely in expletives, it was a beautiful moment. I know some of you are recoiling in horror at the thought of drinking alone but it wasn’t as knobby-no-friends as you’d think. In the middle of a town where I felt out of place and a bit nervous, this beautiful Irish Pub was my security blanket. Well, actually, I think it might have been the Guinness. Whatever it was it was the perfect pre-surpise calm I needed.

Just for the record, the look on my Mum’s face when I walked into her office made the 7 hours of Hell On A Plane well worth it - the Guinness was just a bonus!

I had lunch at the pub again today. Massive schnitzel. MASSIVE. Two pots. A good time had by all.

You’d think after such a heavy meal followed by several alcoholic beverages that it would take the edge off beer o’clock. But it doesn’t - I find that drinking at lunch time is the best thing you can do because it pretty much renders you immune to any alcohol you consume after that. It’s true! Many times I’ve had 3 or 4 stubbies with lunch and gone on to drink more that evening than I could normally hold in an entire week.

Bit shit if you’re actually TRYING to get drunk - but quite a useful thing to know if you just like the comfort and monotony of draining one stubby after another.

And I do…

So we have just returned from our pub (see previous post re. Living Next Door to a Pub etc.) having had 3 drinks while our son miraculously sat patiently in his stroller. It’s a beautiful thing because it’s a rare thing. We went for one quick drink - I had a banana, a drink and a Hairy Mclary book in my bag so I thought we could be good for at least ten minutes but I think we made 30 without the wee man turning himself inside out and squealing at a frequency that could shatter glass and deafen small dogs. Bless him.

This all came about because while we were buying stationary, my husband decided he fancied a pint.

Not a drink. A pint.

Ok. I understand more beer is usually better but I truly fail to see the attraction of a pint and here’s why:

1. It’s basically two pots right? Well wouldn’t you rather have one icy cold drink followed by another icy cold drink as opposed to one enormous drink that starts off being cold and ends up being the temperature of your hand?

2. It’s massive. It’s the Toyota Landcruiser of beer. Maybe if you’re 6ft 7 and built like the proverbial brick shithouse, well maybe it suits you. But if you’re 5ft 6, female, weigh less than a heavily packed day-pack and have hands the size of a toddler - it’s just too big. I can’t be arsed even lifting the thing.

3. See either of the above - they’re both good points.

So that’s how I feel about pints. They might be cheaper, they might even make you feel special while you’re ordering one, but in the long run you might as well order a jug and drink out of that.

But don’t tell my husband - he probably will…

Today we went to the pub for lunch. Not just any pub. Not just “the local”. But OUR pub. I feel it’s ok to call it our pub because we literally live about three doors down from it. There’s actually only one house between our back fence and said pub and I can’t tell you the times we’ve mused about tunnelling under or having a shared walk-way through the neighbour’s yard in an effort to get ourselves to the pub that 5 seconds faster. So which pub is so glorious that we should move heaven and earth to buy a house virtually next door I hear you ask?

The Cascade.

It’s one of the oldest pubs around Hobart I believe. So they really know how to cook a steak coz they’ve had a bit of practice! It’s one of the few old fashioned pubs left in town - some might call it daggy. Uncool. Because it doesn’t offer things like panini, bruschetta, salt and pepper squid or risotto. Well call me uncooth but quite frankly when I go for a counter meal - I want a freaking counter meal!!! And I’m talking chips thanks love - no salad. It’s a beautiful place. The beer is cold, the food is FANTASTIC and there’s heaps of it. None if this dainty little portion size crap at the Cascade - their sole aim in life is to give you indigestion for the rest of your working week before you finally pass something that closely resembles - in both size and weight - a house brick.

Just writing that makes me want to go back over there and order another schnitzel.

Mmmmmm………….. house brick………………

Even the pots they use are pleasing to me. They’re the little short fat ones. Not the long trendy pilsner-type. I think some of my friends find them offensive. But to me they’re lovely - they fit in your hand nicely, they make you feel like you haven’t drunk a whole pot and thus need to have twice as many and, best of all, they’re low to the table - meaning a lower centre of gravity - meaning they’re harder to knock over in a passionate moment of wild gesticulation. See? Perfect.

I love to sit there amongst the Nannas having their Roast of the Day or pureed fish or whatever it is that they’re dribbling down the front of themselves and just soak up that pub atmosphere. I think it’s great that I can take my son there and he can lodge as many soggy chips as he likes into the neighbouring customer’s hair and no-one bats an eyelid. I enjoy being served by waiting staff who look like they would gleefully jab you with a cattle prod to move you out of their way if only it was part of their workplace agreement.

It is a truly wonderful experience every time. Not an ounce of pretense. No attitude. Just great food, cold beer and a 2 minute stagger home.

I love my life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!