Strong Holm

18 May 2020   Upnor, Kent, UK

Blimey, it’s been a busy day since the last post! Last night was a lot of fun, I watched Iron Pier run a meet the brewer and can launch via their Facebook page. It was great, there were about 30 people on the live feed and the two brewers explained everything to do with their backgrounds to the canning process and their future goals. You can watch the video of the session here, I asked a few questions (and was the first to do so!). I’ve very much enjoyed their beers and am particularly looking forward to trying their Breezy Day IPA once it’s canned up in the next week or so.

Following yesterdays spur of the moment decision to sign up to do my RYA Day Skipper theory, today I completed my first lesson. In the morning I headed down to the marina to collect the learning materials and a USB stick with all of the guides. The call was at 18:30 via zoom and there were probably ten or so other students on the course. The experience via Zoom was actually really good, it was very easy to follow the instructor when I could hear him clearly and see the presentation on my own monitor right in front of me. Some parts of the lesson were a little too fast, for example where it is necessary to find a location and work out the lat/long but I will simply repeat these in my own time until I’m familiar. It was a little tricky having enough desk space for the large charts, I think I may use the big table downstairs for future lessons. I have some homework, nothing too major, an hour or two for tomorrow evening which includes some excercises, reading and watching of YouTube videos. I expect I shall have no issue with the latter task. By the way, the random name of these blog posts are fictional names of places on the charts, thought it’d be fun.

Last, Victoria and I were discussing when the ‘lockdown’ timer should end. At home we have a little black board where we update the number of days since we have been in government-mandated lockdown, we’re currently on day 62. We were a few days ahead of the official date, but agreed that our date was our date. With the gradual, well, I say gradual, there’s been hoards of people in Upnor for the last week, it’s literally the only time in my life I’ve seen people enjoying Upnor ‘beach’ and yes, there are people swimming. Anyway, with the gradual change in lockdown when are we considered to no longer be in lockdown? My opinion is that we’re out of lockdown only when the pubs are back to normal. Until you can go to a pub, sit down at the bar, have a pint of cask ale and not have to wear a mask or any of that nonsense, I consider us to still be in lockdown.

Oh, speaking of the pub, yesterday there were people sitting on the pub tables outside the Ship drinking ‘take away’ bottles of beer and eating a ‘take away’ roast dinner out of a foil take away container. This is NOT take away. If you’re eating and drinking it on the premises from where you purchased it, you’re not taking it away. I don’t normally give 2 seconds notice to what people do so long as it doesn’t impact me, but this one was just silly and I’ve seen lots of stupid things over the last few months. The rules are the rules, I don’t necessarily agree with the rules, you may not agree with the rules, but they are for whatever good it will do, the rules. And let’s be real, we can all go 60 days without a fucking roast dinner, let alone one in a foil container - GO HOME. Anyway, maybe they had a special reason to need to eat a roast dinner from a foil container whilst enjoying a cool, crisp bottle of Bud - who am I to judge?

Going to go and have a gin now.

In better news, the kitchen window is getting fixed tomorrow (it has moisture between the panes) and I’ve just booked the Audi to have it’s dents fixed too. I’m very excited about both of these things. They are going to cost me more than the Day Skipper course, but they will bring me much happiness.