I had planned to write a blog this weekend on a story I’d seen in The Sun newspaper on Friday. Titled “Master Lasters”, the story focuses on British men’s performance in bed.
Normally, we get derided for being poor lovers in comparison to our European counterparts, but this story shows that researchers in Holland – investigating that favourite bar topic, Premature Ejaculation – have discovered that British men last longer in bed with their sexual partners than any other nation.
To be fair, it wasn’t this that had caught my attention and neither was it the fact that apparently we last an average of a mere ten minutes that had given me an idea for a blog, but the fact that in the article alcohol gets a mention.
With the British pub trade on its knees and alcohol usually cited by all and sundry in the media as evil beyond the realms of Ming the Merciless, I always like to try and find ‘good news’ stories for alcohol to lift morale a little bit, and here I thought I’d found something I could use.
But then I got distracted. Having diagnosed me with concussion following my attempts to beat myself up with pub’s smoking shelter, my doctor decided I needed to take seven days off work to recover. Being a publican, and with a big bar to do on Saturday night for our local Cricket Club, I had to shrug off the doc’s sick certificate and follow Plan B instead. Plan B basically outlines the fact that, rather than taking time off work, I try to relax as much as possible, avoid stressful situations or exerting myself too much, otherwise the effects of the concussion might last a little longer.
With a big bar to put together and the everyday business of the pub to attend to, Ali and I farmed the children off to my mum’s for the weekend, where she could take the kids to the local fair. The trouble was, getting them there. In the end, I opted to drive them from our home near Newmarket, to my mum’s near Buckingham and so, on Friday afternoon, I piled the kids into the Vel Satis and headed on my journey.
Taking it easy as I drove, I started to plan out my blog in my head, thinking I could write it after the pub shut later that night.
The kids and I chatted and, after an inordinate amount of time stuck in roadworks and traffic, we arrived at my mum’s house. A quick up of tea, a natter, a good bye to the boys, and back in the car to get home before the pub got too busy.
And that was when the starter motor seized.
Stuck at an awkward angle on the back of my mum’s driveway, there seemed absolutely nothing I could do to get the car to start, so I resorted to my breakdown service who promised to be with me within the hour.
Two hours later, and with my headache building, the recovery driver arrived and announced that he couldn’t help. “Nothing we can do here, mate,” he said.
And that was when, at nine o’clock on Friday night and ninety miles from where I should be, the recovery bloke informed me that I didn’t have ‘home recovery’. “I can take you ten miles to a garage, mate,” he said, “but otherwise it’s going to cost you a small fortune for me to take you home.”
A few hours later I found myself tucked up and sleeping in a single bed in my mum’s house for the first time in more than twenty years.
Saturday morning dawned and we made arrangements for a local garage to get the car and have a look at it, while my step-dad brought me home so I could start to set up the bar for that evening.
Normally, it takes me and Adam an hour and a half to get a bar set up, so the plan was simple: get the bar set up and then try and spend Saturday afternoon relaxing before the evening, but with the garage having rung and announced that it’s going to cost £300 to fix the car and the part can’t be got before Tuesday, it didn’t look like any amount of relaxing was going to ease my headache.
Finally, at about 1pm yesterday afternoon, Adam and I got the bar in place. We checked everything was sorted, then connected the lager to the gas mechanism and opened the tap.
And that was when the regulator on the gas pipe disintegrated…
---
It’s now Sunday afternoon and you can see why I had completely forgotten about the original blog I was going to write. It seems trivial now, but The Sun’s article brazenly announced that British men last longer in bed than any other nation, and that men who consume alcohol before sex last even longer.
I can’t remember what I was going to write, what quips I might have thought up about Brewer’s Droop or, indeed, that some might see that as a ‘good news’ story about alcohol for a change, but somehow Adam and I, with the help of a chap called Kevin, did manage to get the regulator fixed and, with half an hour to spare, were ready to get the bar open for the evening.
But my car is still stuck in Buckingham and I’m sitting here at home, hoping to relax in front of the telly, a beer in hand and the Brazilian Grand Prix ahead of me.
But Jenson Button’s grid position isn’t doing my stress levels any good at all…
Posts
