On the way up Church Street to the first mentioned, struck by the handsome building, once a house, next to the Beaumont Nursing Home. I thought flats, but closer inspection reveals it to be solicitors, as per reference 2.
Kings Head busy at around 1915 on this Friday evening. Old fashioned touches like a rack for glasses above the bar, common in the saloon bars of my youth, abolished, I had thought, on account of health and safety. There seemed to be all different glasses for all the different lagers, a sort of cut price version of what you get in the better class of bar in Brussels. There was also a short rack of what I used to know as dimple (pint) mugs, although I did not think to ask whether these were available on request or whether they were assigned to favoured customers. There was also a real fire, real enough that one did not want to sit too near it.
While the riser, a couple of hours later, was more or less empty. Which meant that the two young barmaids were both bored and friendly. Unusually, they could offer a number of different versions of cassis, from Giffard, which they assured us were all pretty foul. The bottle I looked into certainly did not smell much like Ribena. While Bing fails to load their website. But I did learn that the stuff came from Bourgogne, and I do remember a place called Saulieu (of reference 3) where they were very keen on blackcurrants, with the fruit, leaves and juice being used in all kinds of imaginative ways. In a restaurant where cigars were dished up from a large wooden box on wheels, which I was asked to take in the coffee lounge, rather than in the restaurant proper. Very good it was too. But I think I took it with brandy and don't remember about their cassis.
Several reproductions of pictures by the very successful Scottish painter who does pictures of people in evening clothes, with umbrellas, on beaches. For whom Bing offers one Robert Kelsey, while Google offers Jack Vettriano, which is the right answer.
For the first time that I remember, I was reduced to using my telephone to summon a taxi from Viceroy. Which resulted in various inbound messages, which I quite failed to read until after the event. But the taxi did turn up and it was very cheap, a smart new hybrid with lots of dials and so forth on the dash and a lot cheaper (before tip) than a black cab from the station would have been.
But the most important event of the evening, was a brain wave about the moon. I had long puzzled rather vaguely about why the moon appeared so high in the night sky, a lot higher than the sun during the day. If all the planets and all the moons are in the same astronomical plane, how could this be? On this night of full moon, it dawned on me that it was all to do with summer and winter. If it was winter with respect to the sun, as it was, it would be summer with respect to the full moon, on the opposite side of the earth from the sun. A dawning which I think is confirmed by the diagram above.
Where P is the line of the plane. L is the line of latitude on which we happen to live. And it is clear from inspection that the angle α is less than the angle γ while the angle β is greater. QED as we were taught to say in O level geometry.
Reference 1: https://www.yeoldekingshead.com/. Not to be confused with the real thing.
Reference 2: http://www.bowles-solicitors.co.uk/.
Reference 3: https://saulieu.fr/home/#accueil.
Reference 4: https://www.jackvettriano.com/. Born in Fife. Italian connection?
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