tantramar

Sweet Mama

This is Mama Thai, one of my favourites in East London. They used to be in Spitalfields market before the corporation of London royally screwed the whole place, now they are just around the corner from there. It occurred to me that I never really write much about stuff in London so I thought I'd mention Mama Thai.

£5 will get you almost any meal in here. The Masaman curry and chicken noodle are what I mostly eat here and I'm always pretty damn happy with it. The folks who run it are super nice, including Pam who is Mama Thai herself.

A Yard In 34 Seconds!

I saw this Yard of Ale drinking contest table in the Acorn Inn in Dorset. Man that’s a tough game. A yard of ale has three pints in it! You have to down it in one. That’s not easy. There’s a Guy on this board who did it in 34 seconds. Holy Shit is about all I can say to that.

A yard of ale came about because the coachmen (coach and horses) on long coach journeys didn’t want to get off the coach when it stopped, on a water break for the horses. Servants would pass up a yard of Ale up to the coach drivers. As it was a yard in length the coach driver was able to reach it from atop his high perch.

Beer Caves

I went to the Beer caves at the weekend in Beer, East Devon. There was no beer there sadly, but just some caves that have been there for 2000 odd years. The Romans starting quarrying stone there, then pretty much everyone else after that. It’s good stone you see. Many English Cathedrals have been built out of it.

The geologist, John, who was taking us around these underground caverns explained that the rock above our heads was so dense that the rainwater takes a long time to seep through. In fact the drops that were falling on our heads in the caves landed topside some 400 years previously. I thought that was pretty nuts.

He also demonstrated how incredible the echo was in the caves (as you might expect). He explained that with 100 people swinging picks into the rock for 12-14 hours a day, the noise was deafening – making many workers, stone deaf.