Things I learned this weekend

That Red Leicester is excellent in a ploughman’s.

That the dark suit/red shirt/short beard combo works pretty well.

That alcohol creates blundering cretins out of sensible sophisticates, however well-turned-out.*

That ordinary plain black thread is much harder to find in the shops than is reasonable.

That sewing buttons onto shirts when hung over is a mug’s game.

That the actor who played Khan in Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan is not, after all, David Carradine, but Ricardo Montalban – who, on reflection, doesn’t really resemble Carradine that much.

That there’s a song by the Streets that has a very Squeeze sound to it; and, relatedtly, that if you say “Is this Squeeze?” when it comes on, the noise of it may cause people to mishear you and be impressed by your knowledge of music; but, that if you labour the point about how, even though you’d never heard the song before, you just knew it was Squeeze, then someone will eventually hear you right and you will be exposed as a prattling, self-satisfied moron who will be going home alone.

That it’s perfectly possible to abandon a pint less than a quarter of the way down, simply because you reckon you’ve already had enough, without immediate ridicule.

That if there’s one thing better than a chocolate brownie, it’s a pack of six chocolate brownies.**

* I did already know this, but it has a habit of slipping my mind at key moments.
** I’ve long suspected this to be true, but the empirical confirmation is priceless.

I hope that some of this knowledge may be used for the general betterment of humanity.