Another night at the Great British Beer Festival ... a big gang of us were there this time. Had a nice time in the Welsh area, before sampling one of my old favourites, the somewhat tart Drie Fonteinen Oude Kriek, and moving on to a cider. I reckon rating 5 is right for the cider - medium dry, but it still has a good sweet fruity edge.
Another Great British Beer Festival in Earl's Court this year. Matt and I met up with Andy, and Luke from Australia, and we sampled a range of ales before gorging on pie.
I tried to drink in thirds this year, to avoid getting pissed too quickly. This was a reasonably successful strategy too. I enjoyed Allendale's Wolf, "beer with a bite" as the description cheerfully advises, Coach House's Posthorn Premium Ale was refreshing and dry, even dryer and quite weird was St Peter's Grapefruit Beer, which smelt exactly like grapefruit, though the flavour was more balanced. I had Leatherbritches Raspberry Belter too, which I also enjoyed in 2006, a great crisp fruity summer beer.
Matt won a blue CAMRA t-shirt in the tombola this year. The smallest size they had was large though! We'll have to use it as a morning after dressing gown style shirt...
A glorious Brighton Pride this year, blazing hot fun in the sun in Preston Park. Lots of us went, we took pills and K, went on the fairground rides, including the mega high soaring ride where you can see the whole park spread beneath you before you plunge down in a heady rush of MDMA glory, took to the beach as the sun was just setting, and Jordan, Alex and I had a quick swim. Then we met up with Adam, Matt and Kayla, who had just moved back to Brighton these last couple of days, having a fond pint in the Barley Mow, fabulous scene of a hundred Bell hangovers. It's really nice to have Adam and Kayla back up in Kemptown again.
Hot on the heels of the Eden Project, work took me to Chelmsford yesterday for the epic 21st World Scout Jamboree! It's huge! 30,000 scouts and about another 10,000 adults of various kinds, in Hylands Park. They are using the huge arena stage that will be used at the V Festival in a couple of weeks time, but for scouting songs and dances. So, at lunchtime all these scouts start singing poppy uplifting songs like One World One Promise, the theme song of the Jamboree, or S Club Seven, or Dancing In The Street. It was all quite glorious, if somewhat cheesy too. I was practically moved to tears by the earnestness of it all.
CAMRA's Great British Beer Festival has moved to Earl's Court this year – lots of glorious ales as usual, and this year I also got quite into the cider. Lots of it actually doesn't smell like sick, and I really like some of the more dry ciders. I also discovered the deliciously and exceptionally tart lambic fruit beer, Oude Kriek by the Drie Fonteinen brewery. It's so acidic you have to drink it quite slowly, but it tastes glorious, like a very bad tempered old vat of cherries!
Michal, Kornelia, Ema, Ema's mum, Juicy, Matt and I all headed down to sample the glory of real ale at Beer on Broadway, the CAMRA festival held in Ealing. The venue was the rather magnificent Ealing Town Hall, a high-ceilinged gothic Victorian building. The beer was fabulous. They had Hogs Back Brewery's A Over T on draught, which Ema also took a liking to. I picked up a box of Bananatana, which you can only buy in the Netherlands generally, to take home as well.
It being Ealing, they had a Polish chef cooking good old Polish food as well the usual English stuff. So I had a massive plate of bigos with my ale, which went down splendidly.
Ended up quite pissed. Michal had his picture taken with one of the CAMRA volunteers on the way out. A comedy pairing I think. Traditional and non-traditional.
We then dropped in on Juicy's house on the way home, where he fed us nutty hazelnut naughty liqueur and explained how we might go about making GHB, before we staggered on home.
Alex, Dan M and I went to Glade Festival at the weekend. It was a very sunny, fresh and open air extravaganza! On the first night, we took acid and wandered around the place being scared of the enormous inflatable objects that loomed above us, particularly this star ...
... which we felt was pulsing and alive and ready to leap off its moorings and run us down at any time. As it grew dark, we also became aware near the tent of what seemed to be a giant sparkling throbbing jelly fish floating up in the sky. We walked over to investigate and realised it was a tree where the organisers had cunningly set up a rotating array of coloured lights that shone through the leaves and branches creating, under the influence of LSD, an incredibly intense effect. I stood transfixed for about twenty minutes, convinced that the spinning light nexus at the centre of the tree was a portal through which I could see the indistinct form of what looked like a bearded aged tree god. Very cool.
Next day, we roamed around and danced some more. Alex took more acid. I took loads of speed. Dan, I think, stuck to the MDMA. It was fun dancing in the daylight, and there was a cool dust cloud which was formed when Talamasca took to the outdoor stage. The evening saw us listening to some crazy Aphex Twin. Late evening and morning, we found Jake, he of Oxford drug dealing mad festival loving fame, and wound down with him as Sunday morning dawned across the fields.
Matt and I had a really nice day at Brick Lane festival today, having got up rather late after our respective nights out pilling and tripping. We were strolling up Brick Lane through the merry throngs sampling kormas and buying bubble guns and saris, and were approaching 93 Feet East and that bar on the left with the big courtyard. We could hear as we were approching that they were doing Latin American style music in the courtyard, as they were last year, and Matt joked that perhaps we would see the mushroom people there again, like last year. We both had a funny feeling about this though, and amazingly, when we rounded the corner of the courtyard, there they were again, just by the stage, grinding away in their improbable seventies shirts and big sunglasses and bizarre, yet middle aged, haircuts. The woman with the baseball cap didn't seem to be there this time, but the fairly fat man who dances very slowly was.
Even stranger, there was a new addition to the strange gathering, a very short, very dark-skinned, balding Asian woman, dressed in a long black robe and stood with her head cocked to one side staring strangely at the crowds on the street and smiling enigmatically. She looked EXACTLY like Yoda. I can't begin to explain how Yoda-like she was. Marvellous.
After we'd gone up and down Brick Lane, pausing to check out some bhangra at Allen Gardens, we had a delicious lamb dhansak and a nutty chicken thing. And naan bread. It was so lovely!
WOMAD on Friday was amazing. The whole thing was so well thought out, from the excellent quality food to the lit-up night-time biomes, and the way the various acts were spread throughout the complex. We sang along with a Zimbabwean mbira player called Chartwell Dutiro, who got us to join in with call and response singing, and bounced about to some Brazilian act. The beer was fabulous - with a nice Eden ale, and Belgian banana beer, which made me very happy.
Went today to the CAMRA beer festival at the Kensington Olympia Grand Hall. Such a fabulous venue - like Paddington station without the train track, tall and magnificent and Victorian. There were stands from every region of the UK and a section for imported beers, and lots of food stalls. It being such a hot day and mid-afternoon I started with a nice Belgian banana beer, before moving on to various local varieties. Adrian R and Matt came and joined me around 18.00 and we went on drinking. I found the Scottish beers most to my taste. There were some really good light, hoppy, bitter, citrus/elderflower beers from various Scottish locations. The best was probably Isle of Skye's Hebridean Gold, which had been brewed with oats, giving it a lovely warm oaty flavour.
