Michelle picked me up from the London airport in a rental car. I put my luggage in the back and hopped into the driver's seat, which had no steering wheel. Michelle put the car into gear from the passenger's seat and drove the lefty car on the wrong side of the road all the way to London.
Our first goal was to find a typical English place of drink and we partly successful. We walked to a nearby bar called Gibson, whose menu starts:
How to use the menu: Choose a season that you feel like visiting. Then look at the months in that season and select a drink from those months. The drink will then set the coordinates of your destination.
So of course when we walked in, a grown man was licking an enormous, colorful lollipop as his cocktail. The woman next to him was eating a pine cone.
Michelle's cocktail integrated a mouth-numbing Szechuan button flower. Mine had an envelope on it, inside of which were Pop Rocks meant to be eaten as the cocktail is sipped. Across the bar, the bartender lit a piece of paper on fire and put it in someone's drink, which was garnished with a slug. All around us, people were eating tree parts and drinking trash. I could get used to this!
We met a rambunctious trio of Brits at the next bar (a proper pub called Craft Beer) who taught us Cockney rhyming slang, which is a funny way of talking around these parts. The way it works is you take an expression that rhymes with a word and use that expression instead of the word. Instead of “stairs” you’d say “my room is just up the apples and pears”. Not "having a laugh", but "having a bubble bath" (or "having a bubble" for short). How splendid! Pip pip!
Our home was a well-decorated flat. It had many quirks. My favorites were the door-handle-styled toilet flusher and a red fire extinguisher that was the size of our radiator (see the phone charger next to the extinguisher for reference).
The next morning we had a fresh cup of coffee hit the frog and toad. To Stonehege!
An hour out into the countryside we stopped for brunch at the Leather Bottle, my favorite stop of the trip. The cozy, grassy tavern had four fireplaces and felt like a living room that served beer. They also had fruit-based gambling, which I enjoyed:
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| Balance a coin on the lemon to win a free pint |
Our visit to Stonehenge had the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of quenching our thirst for looking at old rocks, our desires were heightened. So of course we had to pencil in an additional stop to the Avebury stone circle, a megalithic circle that is not only larger than Stonehenge, but also has a tavern in the middle. And was only an hour's drive away! We made it to Avebury and walked the magnificent circle, which was littered with magnificent sheep, before heading into the tavern to warm up with one of those warm and flat cask ales that Brits like.
Inside the quaint tavern an old pooch lay next to the fireplace. A handful of older lads sat at the bar. They looked to be in their mid-fifties. The oldest was maybe seventy.
Michelle and I sat with our ales as the barkeep came out from behind the bar. “Pete,” he said, talking to the seventy-year-old looking lad, “I found your drinking glass”. He held up a glass that had 80th Birthday etched into the side. The others had a laugh. One of them piped “but that was from free years ago, wuddin it!”. They laughed again. “Bastards,” Pete muttered to himself. They all had a bubble. I smiled too, and sipped my gross flat beer. Pip pip.
