The Belle Vue

There comes a time in every columnists life where your deadline is looming and you have naff all to send your editor. Then, out of the blue, a friend asks ‘Wanna to go to the pub tonight?”, which is handy because you write about beer and need some material, but mostly a fine idea because you like drinking. As we walked into The Belle Vue I was first struck by how bright it was, then by how few real ales were on. It transpires that they had sold out of a lot over the weekend and any potential barrels were still resting. Damn. I had the choice of Bombardier Gold or Black Sheep Bitter. An easy choice. For a standard bitter at 3.8% you can do worse than Black Sheep. Inoffensive, decent enough flavour, perfectly drinkable, but it was a shame the choice was so limited. As we took our seats along with nine others for the pub quiz, I began to wonder whether I should have stayed at home and made my column up. Just over an hour later we won the quiz, a round of drinks (we had the smallest team so the pub struck lucky) and a bottle of wine. Ten minutes later we had also won the pot of money. We didn’t make many friends that evening but as we wandered home drinking our winnings,  I stood in the car park of Toys ‘R’ Us waiting for my male friend to finish peeing and I was reminded not to judge an evening until it’s over.

PSB