The Best Pub In The World (made up for camping)
I hate camping. The waking up at a 90 degree slant with a dry mouth, an over- full bladder and a hairbrush molded painfully into your pelvis after someone on ketamine called Ketamine Pete stumbles over your tent-pegs repeatedly and his mate, Si, laughs with a really annoying high pitched burst at irregular short spaced intervals all night long.
Then you semi-wake from drifting uncomfortable burning/broiling hellish semi-consciousness with either the unrelenting sound of rain smashing against the sagging flaccid Ketamine Pete shaped dome of your Eurohike or burning relentless sun making you feel like an unappetising hairbrush and stale alcohol flavoured pizza in a sagging burning Eurohike topping.
It will be 5.35 am at this point and you will NOT get back to sleep.
And if you piss in the saucepan, the saucepan is always too suddenly too tragically too late small for the surprise enormous piss and you discover the hurriedly emptied by being splashed outside the tent saucepan being used to make baked beans by a cheery eyed fellow tent-person who loves camping.
This cheers you up.
I hate camping. I have only ever done it at festivals for the pure reason to be gruesomely debauched at a festival and certainly never ever considered it festival-less with a small child. I’m not an idiot.
It is festival season now and I am with a small child in a campsite minus a festival. It is a very pleasant campsite, Low Greenside Farm, hill and field ringed and pleasingly free from the sea of irritatingly jolly expensively water-proofed campers I was fearing wide-eyed at four am the previous morning. I’m not a general fan of people. Especially when they rustle.
Tragically, I greatly enjoy researching holidays on the internet. Since the decline of cash and the arrival of the child, the excited search for the best deal on boutique hotels in Edinburgh ( ‘well someone on Tripadvisor said the lavender chocolates on the pillow were the same for two days running!’) has been sadly discontinued.
Now I am looking for cheap campsites in a safe proximity to our house.
I try to utilise this to my advantage and look for campsites near good pubs. The Lake District is out because our only view would be the kayak on top of the car that is worth more than our house in the queue in front on the M6.
Hmmm, Ravenstonedale- 45 minutes away and two good pubs, the campsite looks refreshingly deserted of hoards of ruddy faced pains (who might even sing in a jolly fashion-that has been another major concern ) in Hunter wellies, indeed pleasantly free of anything apart from toilets.
I approve of toilets. They are better than people.
Ravenstonedale itself (and is that not the best name for a place ever? You think of err, ravens, stones and even dales if you have a particularly imaginative frame of mind. Often places called things like Cherry Tree Orchard have been named by Persimmon or Barrat Homes to replace what was previously there but here in Ravenstonedale ( say it again and it’s all Tolkien) there are no Barrat homes, just jovial people who beam at you and give a jolly ‘hello’ and a coment on the weather before touching up the Tudor exterior timber on their annoyingly ancient beautiful house like that is a totally normal thing to be doing in 2014. In a recession. In the North.
It is a village that time and Barrats Home forgot. Apart from the prices of a large red wine. And we all know that is a major theme of Unicycle Emptiness.
However and you will probably all faint at this. I have finally been to the BEST PUB IN THE WORLD.
That’s it now. I have jumped the shark. Life is now meaningless. My search for the best pub in the world (well within a close proximity to the North West of England) is over. It is the Black Swan. I feel a bit like Edmund Hillary.
If Edmund’s main endeavour had been sitting getting slightly drunk in a massive pub garden that he discovered on Tripadvisor.
It is a particularly massive beer garden though with all the things I am doomed to never discover in a beer garden again- a stream with a tyre swing over it, a friendly cat, red squirrels, a hammock, trees, garden games such as quits and skittles, a bbq hut and bbq selling for a reasonable price freshly grilled local meat or in my case a portobello and halloumi burger with watercress (£4)
Oh and the camping? Reader, I managed it.
Despite the five am rain.