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Great but rare pleasures

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I’m currently in the pub, on pint 2, at 1:39 in the afternoon. I’ve just had a 5 mile walk in the Berkshire countryside, and a ridiculous BBQ lunch awaits down the road.

I’ve been sat here reading in the pub, by myself. I have that tiny but lovely 2-pint buzz on, which has three available options for the immediate future:

– get legitimately drunk

– be hungover by 5pm

– walk the tightrope of maintaining a light afternoon buzz until bedtime.

I’m aiming for the last one, but tbh my only definite is avoiding the second.

Isn’t it great? One’s own company, a book, a pint in a proper little juicer (this one being the incomparable Two Brewers in Windsor: look it up). I hardly ever do this, but when I do, it’s so good.

Unsurprising Larkin ref follows:

“Selflessness is like waiting in a hospital
In a badly-fitting suit on a cold wet morning.
Selfishness is like listening to good jazz
With drinks for further orders and a huge fire.”

What rare, small pleasures do you value most?

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Comments

  1. Nicely expressed. A solitary pint and a book in a warm sunny pub garden would be a rare delight.

    Right now, my small pleasure (though not so rare) would be dropping like a stone into the swimming pool over the road from our flat at 6.35 in the morning, then swimming underwater for 150m of the first length before settling into alternate lengths of (amateurish) breaststroke and (sturdy) crawl. Then, a really hot, pounding shower afterwards. I’ve never swum regularly like this before and it’s great!

    Edit: Sorry, VV – I have no head for measurements. I meant 15m

    I mean – I’m getting better at swimming – but you should see some of the swimmers – like sharks, it seems they would stop breathing if they paused between lengths. I bet they could manage a 150m length pool.

    • Mad keen swimmer, me. Most days for over thirty years now. My favourite ever tips:
      1. Don’t aim to lower your time, aim to lower the number of strokes used.
      2. Elbows high (for crawl).

      • It is enjoyable to see how an improving stroke can reduce the number per length – I can’t do the breaststroke kick at all – it kind of screws off to the side – but the front end is getting marginally better. With the crawl, it’s evolved from lower arms to whole arms to whole upper body in each movement, though I can only breath out on the right side.

        • “I can only breath out on the right side.” Left for me. I wanted to swim the channel (no, really!). Two things put me off – firstly the cost and secondly the info I read insists you should be able to breathe from both sides (to avoid boat pollution or something). I’ve tried and tried and right side just doesn’t work for me. Can’t do the forward roll at the end of a length thing either.

          • And I can’t spell the verb ‘to breathe’…
            That forward roll thing is very classy. I fancy doing that when I can swim more than 4 lengths consecutively without a well-earned gasp and stretch.

            • Know what you mean @salwarpe – I have a decentish swimming stroke and can swim underwater pretty well but I just cannot get the breathing right when I do the crawl and 4 lengths without a breather is about my limit too. It’s not stamina it’s breathing technique and mine is all wrong.

              • “It’s not stamina it’s breathing.” Totes. Have you tried YouTube vids? There are plenty of gooduns on how to breathe while swimming. Once you get the knack it totally changes everything, you can keep going for as long as you want. And it’s very much like the proverbial riding a bike. I expected that I’d be a bit rubbish after the lockdown put a long halt to my swimming, but I was surprised to find that cos the breathing came straight away that wasn’t the case.

              • Cheers, @SteveT – for me it is stamina. I’m doing all right, considering I only started regular morning swims at the beginning of March, in that I can breathe OK, as long as there’s no wash from a passing swimmer – but I do notice that turning only to the right to breathe isn’t that great for my neck muscles.

                Today I managed 700m and I think did up to 8 lengths without (much of) a pause. Bit by bit, it’s getting better.

                • I’d say you’re doing tremendously well, more power to you.
                  On the neck thing, I bought a stretching book a couple of years back that was pretty useful for specific activities, including swimming – in truth YouTube is the best place to see exercises properly broken down- there are a bunch of really simple warm up/warm down ones that have pretty much eliminated the neck strain I used to get.

    • Wow, that’s impressive. I’m always impressed by swimmers as it’s something I’ve never been able to do. To be clear, I can swim, but I’ve just never had the technique to be able to manage anything over any kind of distance other than a clumsy breast stroke – and the muscles in my hands get sore so I must be doing something wrong. Doing lengths bores me to tears. I’m a bit the same with running as well. (Walking is a different matter – love walking).

      I sometimes wonder whether it’s worth going for adult swim lessons. Maybe one day.

      • Never much of a swimmer or, indeed, a fan of the life aquatic, possibly since nearly getting swept away in the Benodet current in Brittany some 40 odd years ago. However, my love and delight of immersion has been escalated by the thrill of cold water wild swimming: lakes, rivers, quarries, reservoirs. Insulation with a wet suit gives me a buoyancy I didn’t know I had, and the endorphin and serotonin rush is immense. Four degrees has been my coldest, the wife gunning for ice to break.
        Wonderful.

        • I swim in the Thames estuary all year round without a wetsuit. You may not last as long in the water (at the moment it’s around 4 degrees, so 5 minutes tops without getting my head under) but I firmly believe the cold water direct on the skin does wonders for you.

    • A daily swim has been my routine for the past couple of years since I took early retirement and is still a daily pleasure.

      We are lucky to have a nearby country club with an excellent (and not too busy) 50m pool. It’s a nice 15 min walk up there, I generally reach about 8.30am and then swim for 45 mins or so. I’m very much a clumsy breaststroke – in fact i create so much wake, my wife refuses to swim in the next lane to me and usually banishes me to to the lanes with wave breakers.

      Agree with Gary on the strokes – the Apple Watch measures the number of strokes (not sure how accurate it is) as well as the time / No of lengths. I definitely see a correlation with lower strokes, faster laps.

      For some reason though, in recent weeks I’ve gotten significantly slower. I’m not that bothered on the time (I’m doing purely for the pleasure and exercise) but the engineer in me wonders why. I don’t feel more tired or that it’s harder. I do have an ache in my shoulder in a morning when I wake up but it’s fine during swimming, but I suspect it’s related to that. I may have to change my style – I can do crawl but hate wearing goggles……..

  2. A steaming hot, huge mug of Bovril, sipped while sitting on a rusty old folding chair just behind the halfway touchline at a decent game of rugby, wrapped up warm in proper clobber on a bright cold winter morning.

  3. Nature. Absolutely. Just being in nature. Oh and the sea. Very much the sea.

    When I think of England (I haven’t been there for a long time) I like to think of warm summer evenings, sitting outside a pub with a beer (back then, it’d be a spliff now) and cricket being played in a nearby field. A cliched romantic vision, but not one that difficult to come by I don’t think.

  4. I know The Two Brewers. Very nice. A single pint is the thing for me. Very rare I go for the second as nothing matches that first mouthful. On a broader note and I’m not sure this counts but the first few longer days after the clocks go forward are a real pleasure of mine. I detest the darkness descending before 6pm. It genuinely affects me quite badly. This week being able to go out just for an hour or so after work has been glorious, cold or not..

  6. My great but rare pleasure (which those of you who are musicians will almost definitely relate to) is just playing with a band/group where everything sounds just right, the vibe is there and everyone is on the same page. Doesn’t have to be for an audience or anything, just a jam session or even just in a living room or something… but there’s something special when you just click with other musicians and you start riding the same train and can feel it all at the same time.

    It’s rare. The reality of playing in bands is everyone trying to turn themselves up a little bit louder than everyone else, tempos wavering, some people just not in the right mood, everyone blaming everyone else… or just a general SOMETHING that you can’t quite fix.

    • This is a good one. I’ve always preferred making music to listening to it, because it’s that snap-sync thing where you’re in instinctive lockstep with other humans, and a little event happens that isn’t planned and just works. Nothing quite like it.

      A lot of the best records have relics of those moments: I always think of 2:30 in Back In Black (after the first solo and just before HEY HEY HEY HEYYY) as an example. Phil Rudd, instead of maintaining that perfect swinging beat, hits the syncopation on the snare and crash, so that he’s playing WITH, rather than against, the guitars and bass. Nobody ever told him to, I’ll bet. It will have come in rehearsal, and they were locked together, and BANG, happened once in the 300th practice and everyone will have gone FUCK YES and grinned all over their faces and kept on swinging.

      And obviously they captured it and rehearsed it and refined it, but the sheer YES of the moment is still there on the record and it’s perfect.

      • You had me up until you started going on about AC/DC 🙂 No, I know what you mean though.

        There’s a moment in the recent Get Back Beatles series (klaxon – he’s talking about the Beatles again – AROOOGA) where they are all just sick of each other, and George has left for a few days and come crawling back, etc, and they just can’t get into the groove… and then Billy Preston joins them and as soon as his fingers hit the keys of his Rhodes it just creates that magic ingredient they were missing, and the look on McCartney’s face is priceless – pure joy.

    • I’d like that. I play guitar and piano badly, and think it would be fun to play with a load of other shit musicians – so there’s no pressure to perform anything truly excellent. At uni, we had a group in our shared house – double bass, acoustic, washboard and digeridoo. I used to strum away unnoticed in the background, just happy to be in on the scene. A bit like Eddie in Hustle.

      • I find the best combination is often a couple of really hot musicians mixed with some more basic but competent ones (I’ll let you guess which category I fall into….)… The basic workhorse types ground the whole thing and force the show-off types to play for the ensemble not for individual glory.

      • I’d love to do something like that. I’m way past the idea of wanting to take anything I do musically too seriously, and making a row with a few people of a similar standard whilst partaking of a few cans sounds like an excellent way to spend an evening!

  7. Mrs A and me ran the Harte and Garter in Windsor in a previous life and the Two Brewers was our favourite off -duty pub.

    I also spent a few months later on billeted with a friend in Windsor for a job before we could move and I used to do the two pint solitary reading of an early evening after work at The Windsor Castle down the road (the pub, not the…). Served a fantastic pint of Directors

      • There were massive restrictions on what could and couldn’t be done to the building, especially outside, with it being opposite the Castle entrance and we got stomped on very quickly once for getting one of our maintenance guys to re-paint around the front door in a slightly different colour.

        Liz never dropped in, mind you, not even to the basement squaddies bar.

  8. This time of year. Waking up before the alarm. Opening the bedroom window wide and returning to bed, dozing to the dawn chorus.
    In reverse, turning in early, ready for the morning shift. Dozing off to the just as gorgeous evening chorus.

    Otherwise, that moment when my arse hits the saddle and I am in my natural habitat, riding my bike. Sometimes listening to the dawn chorus at the same time!

      • Try a kookaburra clearing its throat half an hour before sunrise some time, followed by a mob of little corellas. I know they’re only singing the songs their daddies taught them, but jeez…

  9. A combination of solitary drinking and documentary watching when Mrs D retires to bed, followed by getting up early at the weekend whilst Mrs D is still asleep and just generally mooching for a couple of hours.

    Also, washing up with a soundtrack du jour

  10. Rarely drink in the afternoons these days. When I do if the 2nd pint tastes good then I might opt for a third and then pretty quickly the day is ruined.

    Few weeks ago I went to a pub in Toronto to watch Premier League football (at 10am), I stuck to an “English breakfast” and coffee, an elderly Scottish guy I met there was on his 4th pint before midday!

  11. I’ve just had four pints with me dad, listening to him talking absolute shite with Steely Dan on in the background, in about half an hour I’m getting into bed with a fabulous naked woman who is ABSULUTELY MINE ALL MINE, all of this is true, FUCK ME life is good.

  13. I know that pub. I like Windsor, it’s a good little town despite the tourists that throng at the top of Peascod Street and round the old station shops.

    Crikey, I haven’t sat alone in a pub on a Spring day for some long while. I’ve told you all a few times Mrs Beezer was quite Ill a couple of years ago and needed a significant operation. She’s much improved but still temporarily invalid so I don’t go too far away from her for too long.

    What I enjoy most at the moment is getting out the house and walking. The new hybrid working rules have drawn me back into London once a week. I took an empty work meeting calendar last week as a chance to stride about the West End and Covent Garden. It’s a fume filled and grimy city really, but it felt good to stand up straight and pound the pavements and take it all in again.

    • A day to potter about in London with no particular purpose, that’s a great one. Especially on those cold but incredibly clear winter days which you never seem to get anywhere else, not even here in Chelmsford half an hour away.

      • The long Easter school break is on the way and I’m taking those two weeks off.

        Part of the first one will be a visit up to my hometown of Newcastle, for the first time in 3 years. I’ll be on my tod trampin aboot Grey Street, Grainger Street and Clayton Street looking at what they’ve bloody knocked down since.

        I’m really looking forward to it.

  14. This afternoon my daughter came home and informed me that she’d convinced her entire year, some 90 kids, that everyone should turn up to the wrong classrooms for afternoon lessons and only answer to the wrong names. I was beyond delighted by this information. Evidently it took a little while for the teachers to sort it out. Glorious.

  15. Every time I host or go to a gathering, I always find something to enjoy. Meeting people or catching up and talking bollocks with friends really is the stuff of life.

    Gatherings of perhaps 30-40. Pockets of conversation going on, music or karaoke being played loudly somewhere. At our house, in between lockdowns, we were able to properly mark Mrs BCs 50th and we also had an 18th party and a small NY do too. I enjoyed them all.

    Generally I suppose I like the feeling of a full house – with people coming and going. I suspect we will not have the house to ourselves for about 20 years. I am fine with that.

  16. Twenty years ago a friend of a friend – a keen botanist and community worker in that there London, visited our place in Spain, and took a few acorns back home with him. He was working on a gardening project providing voluntary work and training for the homeless in the churchyard of St John’s, Waterloo. Well, I had completely forgotten about all this until I was reminded about it last year. When I went on Google Street View it was a rare but real pleasure to witness two young cork oak trees standing proud in the grounds of St John’s.

    Here’s a screenshot I took:

    View post on imgur.com

  18. Having a really nice day is one of my top rare pleasures. Today was one such.

    We started by heading off to the markets (Aussies say markets when they mean market) in Uki, a village out of town that got really hammered in the recent floods but has bounced back. The locals are an endearing mix of gnarled old country folk and gnarled old hippies. Organic local fruit and veg, Thai food, great coffee and cakes…you know the sort of thing. I bought some dried tarragon from a woman who’d grown it herself. Can’t beat that.

    Then 10 miles further on to buy a Toyota Hilux – 1998, 274,000 kilometres, but it’s been well looked-after and is good for quite a few years yet. New tyres, and the only thing that needed doing after its recent MOT was new wiper blades. We’d decided our impending house renovation was going to require something of the sort, and there it was. We instantly clicked with the couple who were selling it – he a musician and some sort of wellness person (practically compulsory round here), she a novelist with her first novel just out. We stayed yakking away for an hour after the business was done. Pretty sure we’re going to be friends, which is nice considering we’ve just moved to a new town and know nobody here.

    Then back home for lunch – food of the gods, avocado on toast with dukkah and tomatoes, before the onslaught of two grandchildren for the afternoon. The 6-year-old is sleeping over and I drew the long straw and don’t get to share a bed with him – a definite result. So I’m sitting here in the spare bedroom with a nice glass of malt sharing my day. During which, I might add, it didn’t rain at all.

  19. On a sunny day, driving the train to Clitheroe, emerging out of Wilpshire Tunnel revealing the Ribble Valley laid out before me, the Trough of Bowland to the north, Pendle Hill to the east, trundling along at 45mph thinking ‘and I get paid for doing this’.

  20. Cooking a meal you know you can do well. With some music of your choice while you cook.

    In a short while I’m doing some ribeye steak with home made chips and red cabbage and carrots. With a nice bottle of red. That’ll do me.

    • Or that you don’t, but which turns out well. I’ve only fairly recently started making bread, which is the ideal wfh activity as it takes short spells of work over several hours. I also bought a tiny cast iron skillet in a charity shop a few weeks ago so I have improved my curries no end by toasting the spices before use. Additions to my repertoire make me as happy as old favourites I can make on autopilot.

    • This is true but only really works when the cooking is in a quiet phase – chopping, baking, grilling etc. When you’re frying or running a mixer or whatever noise making machine you have to hand, the music is often drowned out to an annoying degree. At this point I tend to harass the volume button on my speaker while engaging Big Audio Dynamite.

        • No. 10 Upping Street was the one I first bought and the one I tend to play. Takes me back to lonely student digs in 1986. I lost track of them in the 90s. They made nine studio albums, and I’m unfamiliar with many of them. Will give Megatop Phoenix a spin (translation: I will press buttons on Spotify) while I’m painting this morning.

          • It’s good – though I kind of think Mick was flicking through Face magazine (e.g. Sambadrome) when he was writing the lyrics. This Is Bad is my favourite. I was getting into films at the time, so the littering of tracks with quotes from Nic Roeg (particularly Insignificance) and Sergio Leone was just catnip to me. Medicine Show, E=MC2 and particularly The Bottom Line are three of my favourite songs ever.

            I listened to Megatop Phoenix on my cycle along the Rhine to work this morning. I have a soft spot for Mick Jones, so I will probably try it again, but there was no instant click like I got with the 1st album, nor event the wit and style of the 2nd. Maybe I need to listen out for the Bernard Cribbins?

            • Intervention Records in the US did a super-duper remaster of This Is B.A.D. which nobody bought, and I picked up for about a tenner in the UK. They also did the first Erasure album – the one which nobody bought.

              Given the hardly hi-fi sounding master tapes, This Is B.A.D. sounded much like it always did.

            • Just listened to Megatop Phoenix and it doesn’t sound as coherent as the first two. Sounds like they are scratching around a bit for new styles. At their best they can be a force of nature and I can’t think of many bands that have equalled their spirit and energy.

              • Listening for the second time, and as before, it only really seems to kick off with ‘Around The Girl In 80 Ways”.

                Wiki has a reason why they might not have been firing on all cylinders:

                “The phoenix in the title is a reference to a near-death experience of Jones, who had developed chickenpox and pneumonia, and spent several months in hospital prior to recording this album”

  22. Not rare, exactly, because it happens every year but for around a week or two my magnolia tree is absolutely covered in those big tulip-shaped blossoms. I look at it in awe and can never quite believe that something so extravagantly beautiful is allowed to exist in Calvinist Scotland.

    • Another great one. There is a bird cherry outside my living room window,. It’s always a pleasure whatever the time of year, but in late spring there are a couple of weeks when the whole thing is ablaze with blossom which fills the window. If the setting sun catches it just right there is a golden hour when each petal looks like one of millions of tiny fairy lights.

      View post on imgur.com

  23. Lando, I was going to say something along those lines. For the last two weeks or so my sweet suburban little walk to work in the early morning sunshine has been stunning . And now the cold weather has returned and I’ll be kicking my way through the blossom.

  24. I like to sit down eating breakfast on a Sunday while reading the Sunday Times. As an early riser, in the old days, I could only really do that if I was in Central London on the Saturday night so I could buy the paper around midnight. These days, with the print edition on the web, I can do it every week… it’s lost it’s allure…. except….. In a couple of months, I’ll get the rare pleasure of sitting in the sunshine eating my breakfast and reading it.

  25. Standing in my kitchen on a blue-sky sunny morning looking out on the day, with my first piece of warm buttered toast in my hand, chewing on the first bite.

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