Blog Tracker
30-09-2019, 18:21
Visit the Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog site (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pub-writing-round-up-september-2019/)
With a ten-day holiday at the start, September got off to a slow start on the blogging front, and we only managed 12 posts in total.Mind you, we did post on the Patreon feed every day from Belgium, amounting to about 5,000 words in total. The first entry, written on arrival in Ostend (https://www.patreon.com/posts/belgium-day-one-29642086), was on open access, too, if you fancy a taste.
When we got back to the UK, we distilled all that lot into one long post capturing our impressions of the country, its cafes and its beer (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/impressions-of-ostend-and-brussels-bizarro-world/):
Two bar staff are dancing and miming along to ‘Dolce Vita’ by Ryan Paris as they wash glasses. A man with a shopping trolley, dressed head to toe in custom embroidered denim, lumbers in and raises a hand at which, without hesitation, he is brought a small glass of water; he downs it, waves, and leaves. On the terrace, two skinny boys in artfully tatty clothes eat a kilo of pistachios and sip at glasses of Pils. A group of Englishmen in real ale T‑shirts arrive: “Triples all round is it, lads? Aye, four triples, pal.”
Delighted to be back home, we headed straight to The Drapers Arms and pored over the latest edition of Bristol CAMRA’s magazine Pints West. We enjoyed it so much that we decided to give it a shout out on the blog (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/pints-west-bristol-camra-magazine/):
In general, there’s an openness about it that shows CAMRA at its best. All breweries are covered with enthusiasm and honesty, regardless of their particular cask-ale credentials. Licensed premises of all kinds get a look in and there are heartening tales of local activism to save apparently doomed pubs.
John Braine’s 1959 novel The Vodi has something in common with many other British books from this period: it reeks of beer and pubs. We highlighted some of the most interesting bits (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/pubs-braine-vodi-1959/), like this:
[He] didn’t like the Lord Relton very much. It was a fake-Tudor road-house with a huge car park; even its name was rather phoney, an attempt to identify it with the village of Relton to which, geographically at least, it belonged. But, unlike the Frumenty, unlike even the Ten Dancers or the Blue Lion at Silbridge, the Lord Relton belonged nowhere; it would have been just as much at home in any other place in England.
https://boakandbailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/sherlock_faces_death_raven.jpg
From novels, we moved on to films, specifically the invention of a particular myth of the English pub created in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/scary-pub-movie-trope/):
Consider 1943’s Sherlock Holmes Faces Death, one of the better entries in the run of Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, which gives us The Rat & Raven… The film is set in Northumbria, not that you’d know that from the cast of assorted Brits, Antipodeans, Irishmen and Americans, all speaking stage cockney or Transatlantic English… The pub, which appears 35 minutes in, is located in the country town of Hurlstone – instantly recognisable to students of horror film as the standing ‘European village’ set at Universal Studios, built c.1920 and reused endlessly to stand in for everywhere from the Western Front to Wales to the fictional ‘Visaria’ where Frankenstein’s monster rampaged in his later post-Karloff career.
We approached the end of the month with a couple of related items:
It can really difficult to leave a pub when you’re having a good time (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/just-one-more/)…
…but sometimes pubs make the choice for you and aren’t always polite about it (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/start-drinking-up-now-please/).
Then, way back in the mists of, uh, this morning, we flagged a story from 1966 about a piece of pop-Freudian analysis of British drinkers and their attitude to beer (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-liquid-sex-or-substitute-for-soup/).
We also put together our usual round-ups of news, nuggets and longreads:
8 September 2019 | Stevenage, Sheffield, Sam Smith (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pub-news-links-8-august-2019/)
14 September 2019 | racism and railway arches (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pub-links-14-september-2019/)
21 September 2019 | Catalonia, cask, cans (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pubs-news-links-21-september-2019/)
28 September 2019 | language, complexity, taprooms (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pubs-news-links-28-sept-2019/)
There was also a 1,000+ words newsletter (sign up! (https://boakandbailey.com/contacts-and-about/newsletter/)), a handful of other bits and pieces on Patreon and lots of Tweets, like this:
But does it serve beer? pic.twitter.com/tQP1hbNzlu (https://t.co/tQP1hbNzlu)
— Boak and Bailey (@BoakandBailey) September 3, 2019 (https://twitter.com/BoakandBailey/status/1168938079912124422?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
Next month: cider, apparently. More about that later in the week.
Everything we wrote in September 2019: Belgium, scary pubs, The Vodi (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pub-writing-round-up-september-2019/) originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog (https://boakandbailey.com)
More... (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pub-writing-round-up-september-2019/)
With a ten-day holiday at the start, September got off to a slow start on the blogging front, and we only managed 12 posts in total.Mind you, we did post on the Patreon feed every day from Belgium, amounting to about 5,000 words in total. The first entry, written on arrival in Ostend (https://www.patreon.com/posts/belgium-day-one-29642086), was on open access, too, if you fancy a taste.
When we got back to the UK, we distilled all that lot into one long post capturing our impressions of the country, its cafes and its beer (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/impressions-of-ostend-and-brussels-bizarro-world/):
Two bar staff are dancing and miming along to ‘Dolce Vita’ by Ryan Paris as they wash glasses. A man with a shopping trolley, dressed head to toe in custom embroidered denim, lumbers in and raises a hand at which, without hesitation, he is brought a small glass of water; he downs it, waves, and leaves. On the terrace, two skinny boys in artfully tatty clothes eat a kilo of pistachios and sip at glasses of Pils. A group of Englishmen in real ale T‑shirts arrive: “Triples all round is it, lads? Aye, four triples, pal.”
Delighted to be back home, we headed straight to The Drapers Arms and pored over the latest edition of Bristol CAMRA’s magazine Pints West. We enjoyed it so much that we decided to give it a shout out on the blog (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/pints-west-bristol-camra-magazine/):
In general, there’s an openness about it that shows CAMRA at its best. All breweries are covered with enthusiasm and honesty, regardless of their particular cask-ale credentials. Licensed premises of all kinds get a look in and there are heartening tales of local activism to save apparently doomed pubs.
John Braine’s 1959 novel The Vodi has something in common with many other British books from this period: it reeks of beer and pubs. We highlighted some of the most interesting bits (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/pubs-braine-vodi-1959/), like this:
[He] didn’t like the Lord Relton very much. It was a fake-Tudor road-house with a huge car park; even its name was rather phoney, an attempt to identify it with the village of Relton to which, geographically at least, it belonged. But, unlike the Frumenty, unlike even the Ten Dancers or the Blue Lion at Silbridge, the Lord Relton belonged nowhere; it would have been just as much at home in any other place in England.
https://boakandbailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/sherlock_faces_death_raven.jpg
From novels, we moved on to films, specifically the invention of a particular myth of the English pub created in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/scary-pub-movie-trope/):
Consider 1943’s Sherlock Holmes Faces Death, one of the better entries in the run of Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, which gives us The Rat & Raven… The film is set in Northumbria, not that you’d know that from the cast of assorted Brits, Antipodeans, Irishmen and Americans, all speaking stage cockney or Transatlantic English… The pub, which appears 35 minutes in, is located in the country town of Hurlstone – instantly recognisable to students of horror film as the standing ‘European village’ set at Universal Studios, built c.1920 and reused endlessly to stand in for everywhere from the Western Front to Wales to the fictional ‘Visaria’ where Frankenstein’s monster rampaged in his later post-Karloff career.
We approached the end of the month with a couple of related items:
It can really difficult to leave a pub when you’re having a good time (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/just-one-more/)…
…but sometimes pubs make the choice for you and aren’t always polite about it (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/start-drinking-up-now-please/).
Then, way back in the mists of, uh, this morning, we flagged a story from 1966 about a piece of pop-Freudian analysis of British drinkers and their attitude to beer (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-liquid-sex-or-substitute-for-soup/).
We also put together our usual round-ups of news, nuggets and longreads:
8 September 2019 | Stevenage, Sheffield, Sam Smith (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pub-news-links-8-august-2019/)
14 September 2019 | racism and railway arches (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pub-links-14-september-2019/)
21 September 2019 | Catalonia, cask, cans (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pubs-news-links-21-september-2019/)
28 September 2019 | language, complexity, taprooms (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pubs-news-links-28-sept-2019/)
There was also a 1,000+ words newsletter (sign up! (https://boakandbailey.com/contacts-and-about/newsletter/)), a handful of other bits and pieces on Patreon and lots of Tweets, like this:
But does it serve beer? pic.twitter.com/tQP1hbNzlu (https://t.co/tQP1hbNzlu)
— Boak and Bailey (@BoakandBailey) September 3, 2019 (https://twitter.com/BoakandBailey/status/1168938079912124422?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
Next month: cider, apparently. More about that later in the week.
Everything we wrote in September 2019: Belgium, scary pubs, The Vodi (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pub-writing-round-up-september-2019/) originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog (https://boakandbailey.com)
More... (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/09/beer-pub-writing-round-up-september-2019/)