I hadn’t intended to blog about the annual Bournemouth Beer Festival at all because I had agreed to go to it in a moment of distraction (while I was busy writing an essay or something).

Beer isn’t my thing.

In fact, drinking isn’t my thing. I don’t mean just alcohol. I mean the act of drinking any liquid at all. I am seldom thirsty and I don’t really enjoy drinking liquids when not thirsty because it’s unpleasant. (Like maybe trying to stuff a huge hamburger down your throat when you haven’t got an appetite.)

I do enjoy drinking tasty beverages when I’m thirsty or when I’m eating food at the same time, but drinking just by itself is a chore. Well, I can’t explain it adequately without veering off the point of this post, so you may just put this down on your ever-growing “Sheylara is weird” list.

The point of today’s post is something incomprehensible.

The beer festival was to start at 6:30 pm, so Piers’ friends had arranged to meet at a nearby bar at 6 pm, the reason being that they wanted to have a beer while waiting for the beer festival to start.

Huh?

This makes as much sense to me as someone, say, making a quick stop at McDonald’s half an hour before going to a buffet dinner. (Keeping in mind that the purpose of the beer festival is for people to drink as much beer as possible from a selection of 200 types of beer, within five hours.)

After being in England for a year, I have concluded that the Brits have an internal trigger that shuts down common sense whenever the word beer is mentioned.

Still, they are very lovable people. Despite the fact that beer isn’t my thing, (and also risking the ire of my orthodontist because my Invisalign aligners were sitting in my handbag instead of on my teeth for the whole five hours), I did enjoy myself very much.

It costs £5.50 to attend the beer festival. For that price, you get a beer glass (which you can take home), a beer guide and £1.50 worth of beer. The beers cost £1.50, £2 or £2.50 for half a pint.

You basically use your own glass all night and keep going to the counter to refill your glass after choosing the beer you want.

Because there are 200 beer descriptions in the beer guide, Piers couldn’t be bothered to read them. He was going to choose his beers randomly, so I offered to choose for him, which meant I got to taste more of the ones I wanted to try! And, if I didn’t like mine, I would swap with him! Haha.

The first beer I tried was called Blueberry Classic Bitter. It’s award-winning and I liked it, the word “like” being used very loosely here since I am not a beer person. You can smell blueberries when drinking it and the aftertaste it leaves is blueberries!

But the highlight of my night was actually the pasty which cost a cutthroat price of £3.50. But I would have bought another if I had room left in my stomach. It was so tasty, like a giant curry puff, and actually as filling as a full meal.

I enjoyed it so much that I had Piers buy us pasties for lunch today. Now I’m convinced that they are very, very filling.

Back to the beer fest.

Piers had two giant hot dogs which earned him a lot of flak from all his friends, none of whom ate a single thing all night.

When Piers appeared at our table with his first hot dog, his friend Jamie actually looked astounded and said, “What is this, man? This is a beer festival, not a food festival!”

I’m not sure if Jamie noticed the crowd around the snack stand all night, where people were queuing up to shell out £3.50 for a hot dog or a pasty.

I really don’t know if Piers and I are the weird ones, or his friends are. Just remember that his friends are the same people who went for pre-beer-fest beers.

(Piers and I actually didn’t go for that because I had to wait a bit for Iron Man to finish his 4-hour training so I could put Black Widow on her 4-hour training before leaving home.)

((That’s me playing Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Facebook. It’s a great game for which I willingly gave up 4 other Facebook games to play, cos it takes more time and I don’t have time to play everything.))

Anyway, when Piers appeared later in the night with his second hot dog (all nine inches long of it), I think his friends were quite ready to put a straitjacket on him. (But maybe they are the ones who need the straitjackets to keep them from overdosing on beer. Piers, on the other hand, just needs to be locked up in a room with his Xbox 360 so that he’ll leave me alone to play Marvel on Facebook.)

After a pint of beer and a bit, I had to change to cider for the rest of the night. There’s a small cider counter with about 20 different kinds of cider, which was lucky. They were sweet, therefore more pleasant to drink.

But I kinda wished I enjoyed beer because there were many really wicked sounding ones I wanted to try because they sounded cool or cute, such as Diablo IPL, Empire Strikes Back and Rabbit Punch. (I tried Diablo and it was horrible, like really strong and bitter.)

Like all parties, it got more fun as the night wore on and people had more beer in them. People start doing crazy things, don’t they? Such as breaking a pencil with one hand and trying to karate chop one of the halves into two again.

Here is a picture of Nick (on the right) holding out a shortened pencil in his hands and Lewis (on the left) helping Sarah perform a flying kick at the pencil.

I regret to inform viewers that a pencil was harmed during the photography.

But that’s life.

We move on from mourning the pencil to showcasing another bit of tomfoolery performed by the noteworthy Rich, whose life purpose is to prank people.

He was telling me how he had no qualms at all about walking up to a total stranger to have a chat for no reason at all, maybe to show that he’s very confident or something. Then, he proceeded to prove himself by suddenly dragging this bloke over to our table and making me pose for a photograph with him.

Apparently, he had told the bloke that I was the one who had sent Rich to get him to come over and have a photo with me. What a cheat!

Here’s Rich (on the left) and his victim, Alex, who turned out to be really nice; it was near closing and he had a whole stack of beer coupons left so he gave them all to us.

Not that anyone needed anymore beer, is my opinion.

It is probably a good thing that I don’t really enjoy beer. One can always do with fewer fattening vices in one’s life. I already have too many of such vices, as it is (cream, butter, chocolate, fried chicken…).

But I’ll probably go to the beer festival again, next year. The Brits may get really silly around beer, but I guess that makes them quite fun to be around with.

As long as they don’t come near my apartment to sing drunken songs in the middle of the night while I’m trying to sleep.

I was eating hot cross buns for breakfast today, so I sang the hot cross bun song to Piers, who was eating toast and bacon.

“Hot cross buns! Hot cross buns! One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns!” I sang.

He stopped eating his toast and bacon and gaped at me. “What on earth is that?” he managed to say past his stupefication.

I gaped at him in return. “What do you mean what on earth is that?! It’s the hot cross bun song!”

He just looked blank, or shocked, I’m not sure.

“How do you not know the hot cross bun song?” I said, “Do hot cross buns not come from England?”

“Yes,” he said, “But there isn’t a song! You must have made that up!”

“Also,” he protested, “They do not cost a penny each!”

Which is true. They cost about 20 pennies each at supermarkets (and 80 pennies for the ones we got because they are branded hot cross buns).

Still, Piers is so ignorant of his own culture. Here’s a video of the song in case you haven’t heard it, either. There are many different tunes for this rhyme, but this is the one I know.

I remember when I first visited England last year, Piers took me to the supermarket and bought up all the different kinds of breads. He would, for example, pick up some crumpets and go, “I love this,” and I would say, “I’ve never had it,” and he would say, “What!!! You must try it!”

So he bought hot cross buns, crumpets, bagels, muffins and crusty bread, and then tried to serve them all to me in one meal.

It’s silly, but it’s one of the things I love about him; He doesn’t mind being impractical for the sake of happiness, joy, laughter and gluttony.

He does mind very much, though, when I put his photos on my blog, but I don’t care, lol.

So, here’s another photo of him, holding his newborn niece.

Okay, another one…

LOL. I think that’s a funny one.

But enough.

Here’s one of me or he’ll be really mad at the injustice.

That’s about it for today, really.

But I don’t want to end this post with my photo, so here’s a photo of trees to round things up.

This is a famous street in England called Beech Avenue, which is a long straight road flanked on both sides by — wait for it — beech trees!

There are supposedly 365 trees on one side and 366 on the other side, one for every day of the year and the extra one for the days in leap years.

It’s quite a spectacular experience driving through this road and seeing the trees looming up endlessly.

Okay, that’s all. It’s dinner time and I must go. We’re going to have fish and chips from Chez Fred, which is really good.

There is, apparently, also a fish and chips song, but I think we’ve had enough of kiddy songs for the day. Kthxbye!