I spent a splendid few hours last Sunday watching some County Championship cricket at York's beautiful ground in lovely warm sunshine. Needless to say, a few beers were involved at both the cricket and later on in the city itself.... Cricket and beer are an ideal combination, seemingly symbiotically entwined like bacon and eggs, fish and chips, Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe and Wise, Anderson and Broad. I could go on. Ying and Yang. Watching cricket on a sunny day with a few beers is a fine way to pass the time. But no, I had not gone to York Sports Club to drink beer specifically but to watch some of the County Championship Division One game between Yorkshire and Essex which was one of several games allocated to this lovely ground this season. Any beer consumed was purely coincidental.... York has emerged on to the county cricket circuit in the past few years in a reversal of a trend that had seen first-class cricket no longer being played at several other grounds across the county,...
I've just returned from a couple of days in that London, where I combined seeing one of my favourite bands on one of their rare UK visits with visiting a few different parts of the capital, taking in a few pubs along the way.... Sunday morning and it was an early start to catch the train first to Leeds, and then on to London. So first a breakfast at the Station Cafe in Brighouse before wandering around the corner to wait for the train. The temperature had dropped a bit overnight from the extreme heat of the past few days, and it was pleasant waiting in the sunshine which had been joined by some welcome, freshening winds. The train arrived after a bit of a delay, we got to Leeds, and from there it was an event-free journey to Kings Cross. As I emerged from the busy station it was immediately apparent that down here they hadn't had the message re the heatwave, so it felt as warm here as it had done in Yorkshire yesterday. I set off for my Travelodge and gradually realised I had g...