retiredmartin

January 2024. Preston.

The train back from Accrington arrived at Preston station at 16:38. I really should have stopped off in Blackburn and taken pictures of the modern cathedral, you’d love it, but I was missing Mrs RM.

Our big gig at the Ferret started in less than 3 hours; what could possibly go wrong in that short time ?

A bracing walk along the Ribble via the parks ?

A re-enactment of that famous occasion in 2019 when I took the Old Codgers the wrong way to the Continental and ended up in the Royal Mail Sorting Office ?

Even a coffee and doughnut at Holy Grounds followed by Spoons pizza at the Twelve Tellers would have been relatively “sensible”.

Instead, I phoned Mrs RM and said “Fancy a beer in Niko’s ?”.

“Oooh yes, where is it ?“

“Opposite Marks and Spencers“

“I’m IN Marks and Spencers now !“

This is her, 5 minutes later, typing in “NIKO” on her phone.

Both Blackpool Jane and Pubmeister Duncan had raved about this cosy, upmarket, Serbian run bar, a place I must have walked past but never noticed since it opened a couple of years ago.

Beers from Glasgow (Yoker, to be precise) and elsewhere,

wines from the Balkans,

cans of sour from Poland.

As I said, what could possibly go wrong ?

I even stuck to halves and schooners of the stunning DIPA and sour (“don’t like sours”).

But you can’t come in a wine-led bar and not have wine, especially Serbian Marmalade Orange wine, and it was only a very small (but expensive) glass.

But the damage was done. Ten minutes later we were contemplating “the flight of six hand-picked wines with cheese”, but somehow resisted, though I did start looking at the cans, even as the bar seemed to fill up with blokes improbably drinking murky pints.

As Jane wrote the very next day “I knew I was in trouble, entering the fridge so early on in proceedings, but what can you do? Ultimately, I’d not had a big enough lunch and thus was not making good decisions.“

I knew we had to leave NOW.