(no subject)
Conclusion on the Real Ale Festival: spiggin' awesome. Managed to be in attendence two days out of three; had anyone told me that the folkies were performing on Thursday it would almost certainly have been a three-day c-c-c-comboooo.
My usual rule of thumb is that all types of beer and wine are disgusting, and most other alcoholic beverages aren't much better. While the part about beer and wine remained cemented as ever, the multidinious array of surprisingly nice ciders and spirits changed my mind about the rest. The ciders, in particular, were all mercifully still and had very distinctive non-bitter flavours - that is to say, they didn't taste like all the other cheap crap that I heretofore thought constitutuded cider.
Also, the mead. Dear lord, I never thought a fermented drink could ever taste so nice. Expensive stuff, but damn delicious.
Speaking of delicious, and to complete the exceeding Britishness of the atmosphere, strung up and over every rack of kegs and table in the entire hall were masses of bags of pork scratchings. Genius. I think I got through about five bags of them, all told.
Of course, in the end, a festival is only as good as the company it hosts, and while a lot of people were flaking left, right and centre due to having insufficient mettle to wait in a queue for a mere hour, there were still a lot of entertaining people scattered about: the middling contingient of AnimeSoc who I journeyed in with on the Wednesday (a portentous combination of one snap-happy camera fan, one non-drinker, and a whole load of others getting utterly trashed); the debating society (who became steadily less eloquent as the night progressed, amusingly), and even good ol' Oleg, sitting by the side of the mayhem with a Serious Group of people drinking Serious Ale with a Serious Frown on his face.
Gaming straight after the festival also turned out to be a great idea. Zed0, Michael and I descended upon the place, completely ignoring the DotA that everyone else was playing, and got a game of BZFlag going - a ridiculously fun game involving everyone piloting leaping tanks made up of about four polygons shooting lasers and shockwaves and invisible bullets whilst quipping loudly at each other. Needless to say, the experience is heightened when half-drunk.
My usual rule of thumb is that all types of beer and wine are disgusting, and most other alcoholic beverages aren't much better. While the part about beer and wine remained cemented as ever, the multidinious array of surprisingly nice ciders and spirits changed my mind about the rest. The ciders, in particular, were all mercifully still and had very distinctive non-bitter flavours - that is to say, they didn't taste like all the other cheap crap that I heretofore thought constitutuded cider.
Also, the mead. Dear lord, I never thought a fermented drink could ever taste so nice. Expensive stuff, but damn delicious.
Speaking of delicious, and to complete the exceeding Britishness of the atmosphere, strung up and over every rack of kegs and table in the entire hall were masses of bags of pork scratchings. Genius. I think I got through about five bags of them, all told.
Of course, in the end, a festival is only as good as the company it hosts, and while a lot of people were flaking left, right and centre due to having insufficient mettle to wait in a queue for a mere hour, there were still a lot of entertaining people scattered about: the middling contingient of AnimeSoc who I journeyed in with on the Wednesday (a portentous combination of one snap-happy camera fan, one non-drinker, and a whole load of others getting utterly trashed); the debating society (who became steadily less eloquent as the night progressed, amusingly), and even good ol' Oleg, sitting by the side of the mayhem with a Serious Group of people drinking Serious Ale with a Serious Frown on his face.
Gaming straight after the festival also turned out to be a great idea. Zed0, Michael and I descended upon the place, completely ignoring the DotA that everyone else was playing, and got a game of BZFlag going - a ridiculously fun game involving everyone piloting leaping tanks made up of about four polygons shooting lasers and shockwaves and invisible bullets whilst quipping loudly at each other. Needless to say, the experience is heightened when half-drunk.