dave bushe dot net

Dont cry for me next door neighbour…

5:21 am Wednesday, 27 August, 2008

And so I find myself returning to the scene of the crime or at least another in it’s chain. It’s Tuesday afternoon and I’m sat in Pugg Mahone’s out in Carlton with a hair of the dog pint.

Last night was monumental.

I had a pretty decent day doing very little. I wandered with my camera which was good fun and then I spent a while online faffing around. Over the weekend while just wandering aimlessly I had spotted a tricolour down a side street and found another Irish pub. I thought it would be worth stopping in to have a pint and see perhaps if they had any music going on. It’s Pugg Mahone’s in the CBD.

So I get in and I have a pint and it’s good and they have a special on for dinner on Mondays. A chicken parma with chips for just $7.50. So I had a second pint and some dinner. At this point I found out that from 7pm on Mondays a pint of Guinness is just $3.50 (that’s £1.60) and so that was to be my undoing. I mean at that price it would have been rude to leave.

Suffice to say that by the time I’ve moved onto vodka cokes at close on 3am, I was just a little bit drunk.

Mondays come with a live band who were somewhat compensating for being crap by turning up the volume. I’m still partially deaf in my right ear. This worked very well on a few songs but mainly it wasn’t great. Mondays also come with that old Irish tradition of a wet t-shirt contest. Now it’s entirely possible given how much out of touch I am with bars in Ireland that that kinda thing is standard now but I’d not put any money on it. Anyways you can imagine that with the booze cheap and flowing that it turned into an evening.

I spent much of the evening chatting to a lovely young lady who at various points (ha, I typo’d that as pints but it would possibly be more appropriate) throughout raised my faith in humanity and then in the end shattered it all over the floor for reasons that I don’t even know how to try and explain.

Anyway one song that the band played last night really stood out at the time was Chumbawamba’s erm classic Tubthumping for reasons incomprehensible to a sober mind.

On I guess it must have been Sunday evening I headed out to Chapel Street to take a wander and to get some dinner. I was somewhat surprised to see a TGI Fridays there but once I had, well dinner was set. Years ago back in London there was a TGI Friday’s evening every now and again involving Patrick and Trev and Nick. I recall one memorable occasion where we started in the Porterhouse and then moved in for a meal which ended as many good nights often did with whiskey. The bill was over £80 each. T’was a good night. Anyway it is by no means the best food in the world but sometimes it’s just nice to sit at the bar and have a beer or two (no Sam Adams in this one though) and have a standard feed. And so I did and it was good.

I did have to restrain myself earlier in the evening. There was a Borders and so I had to browse. I’m quite proud that I did not succumb and pay $35 for a new William Shatner autobiography. I read the first few pages and was very amused. So yes very tempted but it’s too much money! Not that it stopped me paying $27 for dinner and beers after. Hmmm, not sure that all works out in the end.

I’m shocked to see that Spore is actually going to be released next week. I thought it might be going slowly into Duke Nukem Forever territory. I’m dismayed to find out that while it will run on MacBooks, it won’t run on the first two models and mine is of course the second model. I can’t get the Creature Creator to run. So that sucks, I would have put in a pre-order in a local EB otherwise. I guess it just means that when I’m done travelling and have some money coming in (gulp) that I’ll need a new computer.

Anyways Melbourne is working out a little better. Leanne has a birthday this week so off to her party on Friday night and I’ve also booked some local things including a Great Ocean Road trip. So that’s not so bad really in the end.

16.03 Melbourne Australia Tuesday August 26th.