Painting The Town Red

My younger brother, Chris came down from Nottingham to visit me this weekend. I like my little brother. He’s cool and insults me in many new and exciting ways, bringing with him the traditions of the East Midlands. I do, however have to remind him fairly regularly that he is the product of a South Coast upbringing and should therefore not be referring to bread rolls as ‘cobs’ or calling people ‘duck’ (pronounced ‘dook’) and so-on.

Among the many thrilling and exhilarating activities that we engaged in over the weekend was a trip to the clubs and bars of Bristol Centre on Saturday night. Now this, I would point out, is something I would not normally do. In fact as a rule I would avoid it as best I could. There are several reasons for this, among which are the regular stabbings, conversation drowning base-lines and nasty, nasty bulgy bits on girls who should either be wearing clothes that fit, or simply wearing more of them! I’m a bit of a grumpy old man when it comes down to ‘going out on the town’.

Anyway, we persuaded the Stead to drive us into town and made our way into the closest bar – an oddly laid out affair on three levels. After making our way to the top floor we located a table served by a sofa and two very cool leather swivel chairs. Much spinning ensued on the part of Little Bro and myself, until Stead pointed out that spinning in one’s chair was not very cool and was unlikely to attract girls.

After a few minutes of somewhat unhealthy interest in the traffic to and from the gents, we decided that our current position was not affording us a particularly effective view of passing… er… trade, so we decided to move on. Two or three identical bars later, we decided to move away from the Waterfront and head up Corn Street. This was not our best move. The bars there were amazingly busy, many of them having lengthy queues outside. Now, I’ve been in these bars many times, usually at lunchtime or immediately after work and, as venues, they have always struck me as pretty mediocre. Given the amount of business they were doing however, my opinion was clearly wrong. The first bar we went into was so busy that we gave up after half an hour waiting at bar for service (or at least as close to the bar as we could get).

What did work out well for me though was that the next bar we went into was a Wetherspoons which meant that the round I bought (as it was my turn) in there cost less than four quid. Bonus.

I thought I’d finish with a few fashion tips for the ladies from the guru of coterie:

I have nothing against the… er… fuller figure. I would suggest, however that anyone who considers reducing the size of their backside by squeezing into trousers or skirts several sizes to small for them should think again. All it does is push that excess flesh straight up, creating a decidedly unattractive spare tyre effect. Skinny girls can also create exactly the same effect using the same technique and it’s similarly unpleasant.

Speaking of skinny girls… wandering round looking like you have an eating disorder is not attractive and is probably bad for you. Eat more pies.

And finally… belts. Belts are for one thing: Holding your trousers up. They don’t need dangly bits, frills, huge coloured disks, ribbons or shiny metal rings on them. They also shouldn’t be hanging around your arse. In fact, given the natural shape of most girls’ waists, you shouldn’t need the things anyway.

This is Victor Meldrew reporting for the BBC…