More domestic danger avoided

I have bought her an iPad, and iPhone and an iRon, so I did not expect to have to do my own ironing. I am having something of a domestic crisis at the moment. After the sewing debacle the day before, from which I can still feel the pain, I was suddenly confronted with a creased shirt and no Nice Lady Decorator available to do her duty. Now chaps all know they should not have to wield an iron as the are dangerous hot things that can hurt you. Much better to leave that sort of thing for the women folk as chaps tend to get injured when undertaking domestic chores.

So after narrowly avoiding serious harm, but rattled by the experience, and with the sun out for the first time in ages, and That Nice Lady Decorator back in my good books, we decided to pop out for a pint. I had heard about a pub at Angmering called the Spotted Cow which I had not previously visited. This was an alarming situation as I thought I knew all the pubs in a 5 mile radius, especially those in pretty villages, and so this gap in my knowledge was eating away at me. It is quite a nice, is slightly run down establishment, improved by having the second best beer in the world, Timothy Taylor’s Landlord on tap.

We had not planned to have lunch but as it was still sunny, I said “It doesn’t look like reindeer” so on the way back made a spontaneous decision to drop into the George at Burpham where Nearly Hairless Nick is the bar manager (I think) and see what was on the menu. He is a deer chap as you can see from today’s photograph. The menu has expanded somewhat, to the extent of putting us both on the horns of a dilemma, if you get my drift. I searched for venison but settled for wild mushroom and spinach risotto instead.

Nearly Hairless Nick is on the right.

After a brief siesta, we had planned to go over to Shoreham where Mr Otway was going to perform a few songs at a beer festival with ranting left-wing poet Attila The Stockbroker. Politically Attila is situated quite a long way to the left of Stalin. I met him around 25 years ago at the Edinburgh Festival and discovered that this arch communist had taken advantage of the Margaret Thatcher Council House Right To Buy scheme, and had almost paid off his mortgage. This was too much of an opportunity for fun to be missed. I spent a long time discussing how he managed to juggle his political beliefs, whilst enjoying the benefits one of the Iron Lady’s most controversial policies, and being a capitalist home owner. More fun was to be had when he revealed that he had a small boat moored on the south coast. I don’t know why, but he strongly objected to me calling it a luxury yacht.

Anyway, in the end, with the hangover from the night before, lunch out and then the Wales versus France rugby match on in the pub next door, we flaked out and lit the fire and opened a bottle of wine and I dreamed of new customers for Currencies Direct. There was one small incident in the White Hart, when, after that Nice Lady Decorator had finished her third pint of Guinness, she asked the gorgeous Melissa the barmaid to “take these empty glasses away, I don’t want to look like a lush”. That they were her own empty glasses, and in my opinion she would be hard pressed to defend a charge of being a lush, counted for nothing.

Chris France
@Valbonne_News