Beer, the Lake District, traffic, and spam!

I’m finally back from the lakes. Hoorah, I hear you all cry!

Well, out of the 8 days I spent in The Lakes, it rained (heavily) on 7 on them. One day was glorious sunshine without a cloud in the sky, but alas that was the day I was driving back

The journey shuold take about 5 hours (from Surrey). However, the journey there was quite bad: it took 7 hours with all the traffic on the motorways. There was a pretty bad accident just past Birmingham, and I sat there for about two hours. Joy. And though I thought it couldn’t get much worse, the jouney back just took the biscuit! I spent 10 hours in the car, most of which was spent sitting in traffic once again. It was mainly Birmingham that was screwing things up (as usual), so I think I’ll make a point never to drive past there again!

So the weather was bad. Very bad. It wasn’t just wet, but it was rather windy too. I went for a short walk on Tuesday and managed to catch a cold, so didn’t really feel to great for the rest of the time. I did see some family though which was good, and I tried lots of new beers! Here is a taster of some that I tried:

Friday

Dinner: Landlord, Timothy Taylor (x2). Loverly beer

Saturday

Lunch: Bluebird Bitter XB, Coniston Brewery. OK, but too much of a bitter.

Dinner: Cracker Ale, Barrrington Brewery. Excellent food, but naff beer.

Sunday

Lunch: Hawkshead Red, Hawkshead Brewery. Bottled beer. Excellent!

Dinner: Jennings’ Cumberland Ale. OK, but a bit bland.
Jennings’ Sneck Lifter. Strong, like something from a beer fest. OK, but couldn’t drink a lot of it.

Monday

Lunch: Morhouse’s Witches Cauldren. OK, but not as nice as thr Hawkshead Red.

Dinner: Raven Ale x 2. Very nice indeed. Defferent to Hawkshead Red: much weaker, but still nice. A good session beer. 1 x Hawkshead Red (bottled) when home (very nice), and 1 x Hawkshead Gold (bottled) (fairly nice, but not as nice as thbe Red).

(More to some, but I wrote them down somewhere else).

So the beer and food was very good.

When I got back I had about 4000 emails to go through. To give you an idea of the spam levels I get, one mail box had over 200o mails in it, and 26 of them were actualy for me. I use spamassasin, but it seems a bit crap. Must try and sort this out sometime. If you mailed me and I missed it, please try again - chances are I deleted it by accident!

And it’s not just email spam I’m getting - I’m getting comment spam now too! So if youre comments don’t seem to work, please don’t worry - I’ve just turned on the comment moderation for a bit while I try and get it under controll.

BritBlog seemed to do quite well while I was away. I’ve got over 400 members now, so it seems to be doing quite well With all the rain, I managed to get some good work done while I was away too. It was planning and preparation for some work that I’m about to start. It’s good being able to spend proper time on this stage of a project - always ends in better results!

Right, got to press on. I’ll be updating this post shortly, when I’ve found the other beers….