I miss the pub. An impromptu drink after work before home. Meeting up down the Albany on a Friday night. Pub quiz at the Pear Tree Inn with my regular team on a Sunday night. The background noise of other social drinkers, raising a glass, chewing the fat and putting the world to rights. The casual relationships built up through time with landlords and bar staff at local haunts. Cask beer!

I may add a search bar at some point but for now, you can also navigate posts according to hashtags, grouped below in a way that makes sense to me and evolving as I post more. Expect a mixed bag. Some of the posts will feature the tagged topic as the central focus of the post, others will merely touch on it. If you'd prefer to scroll through a timeline of posts, head to my Archive.

I guess it started at some point in the late '80s (or maybe early '90s) with painstakingly typing in lines of BASIC on a ZX Spectrum +3, for the dubious reward of a simple Pong style game. I was a curious child, always wanting to know things. Typing all that code didn't lead me to a lifetime at the command line or a shadowy teenage life as a hacker but it was my first experience of looking beyond the standard Graphic User Interface (GUI) kindly presented to the world by mainstream computing.

For drinking between “normal” beers on a long session. For a week-night. For the Designated Driver. For cutting down. For starting early after the third #lockdown Zoom meeting of the day. For getting through pregnancy and breastfeeding. For all these reasons and more, the recent explosion in choice and quality of zero and <0.5% abv beers has been a boon and I love them!

Pick your favourite saying. Perhaps it's a variation on a theme of the Chinese proverb attributed to Lao Tzu:

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

Or maybe it's Julie Andrews from The Sound of Music, singing in your head:

Let's start at the very beginning A very good place to start!

The point is the same. Sometimes you need to stop thinking and just do something!