Assuaging The Guilt

I cycle in, without any mishaps or close shaves for once and completely forget to ‘check in’ with L and she doesn’t email to remind me to do so. Then she texts because her emails haven’t been replied to because all the recent adverse cycling publicity is making her paranoid. It seems that either our email is down or having a bit of a ‘post office’ moment, with things being delayed in the post.

I text her back, telling her that I am fine. Of course, I could be bluffing and actually texting her from casualty but then suddenly the emails start arriving, having taken an hour to travel from Nottingham to Derby, so perhaps they went by car.

L again tells me that she’s fancies a Friday night in town but she expects her guilt to get the better of her and therefore we will again end up down the local, what with Friday being the dogs' pub night. So I try to assuage her guilt by taking them out for a park session first. Now neither dog looks capable of walking as far as the pub.

We head into town.

Our first port of call is the newly re-opened Scruffys. It boasts new owners, new décor and a new menu. Thankfully the trendy bar pink look has been dispensed with, which I’m sure helped alienate their core customers and contributed to them going under. They've gone for more of a whitewashed look, it's not really scruffy enough but it's better. If anything it looks a bit unfinished, which I suppose could = scruffy, particularly if they give us a pot of paint to sit on.

We are intercepted almost as soon as we get in there. Apparently only a week after reopening they’ve had their alcohol licence suspended, due to the wrong type of paperwork being submitted or something. They should have it all sorted by tomorrow but for now, they can’t sell us anything.

Oh well, we shall have to return at a later date. Good to see they have a couple of real ales on the bar, albeit not very exciting ones.

So it’s the Hand and Heart and The Ropewalk as usual. The Ropewalk being where I’m sure most of Scruffys customers decanted to and now probably it's chief rival.