Don’t you go getting any ideas now, d’ye hear?

I never sampled this one. Should I? Can anyone speak from experience on this brew? Or do you have... wait for for it... wait for it... no eye deer.

“Don’t you go getting any ideas now, d’ye hear?” Who said that to me? Teachers, girlfriends, police officers…. Er… my mind has suddenly gone conveniently blank.

But I can’t help it. Something will occur and I’ll seem to drift off for a moment. Here’s what happened earlier:

Scene – at the bar. A neighbour (by which I mean a fellow villager, not the fellas on either side of my house) leaves his lively table and arrives beside me at the bar to pay his tab. He looks at the printed out bill.

Neighbour: (Quietly) “How much is that? I can’t read it.”

Barman: “£34.35.”

Neighbour: (loudly) “Is it? Right…” (digs out his cash card)

Another drinker from my neighbour’s table: (shouting) “How much is it?”

Neighbour: “£200. And I only came in for a half.”

Laughter from the table. The barman puts the PIN machine on the bar top and my neighbour slots in his card. And then pauses.

Neighbour: (to barman) “I can’t see the numbers. You’ll have to put them in.”

Bar landlord: “Don’t worry, he knows the PIN numbers of half the people in the village.”

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Culture

The Loose Bloggers Consortium said: Write about culture. The Fountains Abbey pub opposite St Mary’s Hospital immediately came to mind. A plaque on the wall claims that the bacterium that led to Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin could have wafted out the pub window along with beer fumes, across the road and into the window of his office – leading to the contamination of the culture in his petri dish. The rest is medical history. (And good news for some of my World War Two relatives.)

But I saw a different memorial more recently. While I was joining the great and arty to commemorate Ted Hughes the other day, a stone in memory of people who served in Malaya caught my eye.

The inscription read:

To commemorate the work of all those men and women of the British race who served Malaya 1786-1968

They shall come from the east and from the west and shall sit down in the kingdom of God

The pic I took was too rubbish to show you. There are better ones here, along with one of the Queen Mother unveiling it.

But the inscription raised questions for me. The British race? What is it?

Did he win?

It was nearly the end of the night in my local. Two young women worked their way to the bar in time to get a drink before time was called. They were also in time to enter the landlord’s question.

One question. Free to enter. If there’s a single winner, he or she wins the prize money. If more than one person gets it right, it goes to a second question.

So I encouraged them to have a go – two scraps of paper, a pen, go on, have a guess.

The landlord’s question was this: In the last election Saddam Hussein contested in Iraq, what percentage of the vote did he get?

What? (they said) How are we supposed to know that?

It doesn’t matter. (said I) It’s free. You could win some money. Just have a guess. Write anything.

Oh come on! (they said) Give us a clue. Did he win?

That question took me by surprise. Has Saddam Hussein become such ancient history that young people of voting age in one of the countries that overthrew Saddam, and whose troops have just recently pulled back from Iraq, that their grasp of events is so slight?

Then again, I’m sure there are vast gaps in my own knowledge. And to be fair to the young women in my local, nobody in the pub got the right answer.

I’ll leave you dangling in suspense for the answer. C’mon – it’s just a number.