The 'Live' Post, the unadulterated scribblings of a man in a pub (oh, and a MadDogCast of my jelly-biting mission...)

Health warning. This is a 'live' post. What I mean is, this is the self-obsessed monologue of a man in a pub, the typed up scribblings from the night before, unedited apart from fixing a zillion spelling mistakes and slipping in a couple of commas. If you don't think you will cope then leave now...

I'm at the Evening Star, my favourite writing zone, the best pub around, essentially a beer-drinkers' heaven, four guest ales, four 'own' ales (the pub is owned by a local brewery), a couple of 'own' lagers, several guest lagers, a massive range of ciders and the largest offering of imported bottled beer in existence.

I have a meeting in a couple of hours so I'm killing time, writing my first 'live' post, meaning apart from correcting typos - a zillion of them - you are reading the unadulterated monologue of a self-obsessed rogue who is drinking Verhaeghe Pils.

There is an old man at the bar who is wearing the kind of outfit that should be outlawed. In fact, I expect it IS outlawed in some sensible communities.

This is what he is wearing. Hiking shoes, by which I mean the ones that look like ankle boots but have no ankle bits. Reddy-brown trousers, very red but slightly dulled, faded even. An orange and blue stripey t-shirt.

[pause]

Orange and blue? Draped over his prominent beer-belly. What's really funny is that he's wearing it inside out, you can see the seams.

When I finish my pint I will try to take a photo. Captain Dumbass has been moaning constantly about my lack of photographic evidence. His incessant whining...

A man just wandered in. Long trench coat, black beret at a stupid tilt, a scruffy little black dog on a lead of string. String?

STRING?

The guy in the stripey top just looked around and pointed at the string, laughed, and tried to share the joke with me. Nah mate, too busy writing.

Hmm, two guys nearby are having an in depth discussion about how to pronounce "Icin-glass". [I have no idea what that is, beer, mountain, glass purification?!] "I always thought it was pronounced Icing Glars." "Oh, no, it has to be Icing-Glass"...

How funny is this? There's a haggard old man in the far corner, crazy long grey hair, mature grey beard, a leather jacket that looks so old it could have been one of Elvis's. He has a Belgian beer - I recognise the goblet - who appears to be examining his beer with a magnifying glass. A magnifying glass? What the Hellman's Mayonaise?! This is EXACTLY why I love this place. I can't get a photo, he is 10m away and all I have is my Crackberry, but he is brandishing this little plastic magnifying glass, stopping every now and then to inspect his beer.

Right, I'm gonna go for a wee, then see if I can sneak a photo of the inside-out t-shirt. Ha! If he notices I'll say I'm photographing the beer taps. Genius. I'll draw a line on my pad to indicate a short break.

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Right, I'm back. It's a bit blurred but look - it IS inside out. Actually, we had a good old chat about beer, and the problems with guest ales before I sneaked a photo.

[it's a bit blurred, hard to tell from this blurry photo, but you can see the seams, it was geniunely inside-out. Captain Dumbass I hope you appreciate the effort]

The Dead Dog

So anyway, I'm just back from the pub. Not drunk, mind you, as you can tell by my customary eloquence, just, well, just marginally merry from a couple of beers and a few hours of meaningless conversation.

The reason I'm shovelling drivel down your throat at 23:53 GMT is that this story warrants it. It happened to my mate's wife's girlfriend. So it's not as if it happened to the cousin of the man who lives next to the girl who walks the dog of the brother of my sister's hairdresser's hamster is it?

So my mate's wife's girlfriend had a dog. It was a large dog. I don't remember the breed but it was well advanced in age and had been slowly dying for the last year. Anyway, the poor thing passed away and this girl arranged to take the dead dog to her vet for disposal. I don't know anything about dog disposal, so I'm just gonna take this at face value. The vet was going to dispose of it, doing whatever vets do with dead dogs.

It being a large corpse, this girl was umming and arring about how to transport it across London to the vet's place. She ruled out using a bin liner, the last thing she wanted was the bag to rip and the dead dog to sprawl out into a busy street. That would not help her aspiring modelling career would it? In the end she opted for a sturdy holdall.

She reached the bottom of a staircase in the underground. A smartly dressed handsome young hunk approached her. "Need a hand with that?" he asked. She willingly obliged. The dog, dead as a dodo, was exceptionally heavy.

Halfway up the stairs the dashing young man turned to her. "My gosh this is heavy," he exclaimed, "what the hell is this?"

She panicked. The truth felt ugly. A pretty young girl dragging the rotting corpse of an old dog through London. "It's my boyfriend's DJ equipment," she lied.

When they reached the top of the stairs the man sprinted away, dragging his "loot" away and (I imagine) calculating the tidy profit he would make from it.

I like to imagine the look on his face as inspected his "loot" in the safety of his apartment. The profound state of dejection of a man who thought he was about to make a swift buck, but instead found himself in possession of a dead dog.