That Ain't Workin'

Len, of Christmas Day's marvellous repast, is the joint runner of Ventnor's premier Quality Takeaway Food Emporium, The Ventnor Fish Bar. The shop, where both my sister and I used to work summers (earning me £4 an hour, and more importantly, free fish and chips for life), provides fish and chips of worldbeating quality to the people of the Isle of Wight, as well as pizzas, kebabs, childrens meals, curries, mouthwatering pies and a gamut of extras.

However, what with the wide menu and increasing business, trips to cellar freezers were getting a bit time consuming, so Len asked Keith and myself to pop down yesterday and rearrange the place, using the extra space formed by Len's homebuilt conservatory-cum-work area at the back of the chip shop kitchens.

Ventnor, my home town, is an old Victorian Spa Town. Dignified Victorians would enter horse-drawn huts on wheels, change into their bathing costumes and then swiftly descend into the sea, making sure no naughty members of the opposite sex could see them in their all-in-one bathing suits. After this exciting craze died down, Ventnor was left as a south-facing tourist town with dropping numbers of tourists...until some bright spark in the Island tourist board noticed the eight or nine *cough* antique shops *coughjunkcough* (sorry) in the town and marketed the place as 'The Collector's Capital' of the Island. Genius. We are now a net importer of old people.

Anyway. The town is quite old. The staircases are thin and windy. Len's freezer's were industrial mammoths. It was a bit fraught at times, but after a few grazes, scraping a hell of a lot of paint off the walls (sorry Len) and one time of me crawling underneath it and pushing upwards (getting a blister on my little finger in the process), we got into the shop. Then there were the other freezers, the microwave ovens, shifting those refrigera-a-ators.

It weren't workin'. That's the way you do it. You get your money for nothing, and your chips for free.

(Sorry)

Ahem

Saturday night, as recounted elsewhere, Dave, Ahmed, Sharon, Lizzy, Nick and I went to Ryde and enjoyed a few convivial drinks, taking in the Wetherspoon's and a new little place on Union Street called Bar 53, which I liked a lot but didn't get to stay in very long due to having to take the one hour trek of a bus ride back here to Ventnor.

Yesterday, after the freezer movin', Len treated us yet again to an enormous dinner and an afternoon of drinking and chatting. We were joined by my sister Jemma and her boyfriend Tom, and finished off the evening with Len, Keith and myself playing a few games of chess with whisky and cigars.

All this is distressingly civilised. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to keep it up back in Hatfield.

Allie arrives tomorrow. I'm looking forward to seeing her.

In other news, Miss Shiv's Rural English Christmas Adventure came to an end this afternoon as she jetted back Stateside, while we're lucky that Miss Kate will be honouring the nation with her presence until the new year.

The New Year!
Plans for the New Year are as yet formless, writhing, electric and exciting things, zipping back and forth along phone lines with a stimulating and coruscating power.
Current favourite: A Pub, Then Out to The Square At Midnight, Where We Will Swing On Brass Lions And Hug People We Vaguely Recognise.

Well, it's traditional.

If, in the course of having a great New Year's Eve, you drink so much that you wake up on a windy, bleak, gorse-covered island in the middle of nowhere, then mine's free, and you'll be welcome.