What’s the most depressing thing someone could say to you? “It’s terminal”? “The bouncy castle’s got a puncture”? “Put Emmerdale on”? “Hello”? (If that person is, say, Nick Clegg.)

For me, without a doubt, it’s when you’re in a group and someone says “let’s play cards”. Basically, it’s a shorthand, 3 word way of saying “we’ve run out of things to do and I don’t trust our friendships or the power of simple conversation to get us by for the next hour or so.” Anyone who is in a group of people and suggests playing a card game should be shot for a basic lack of imagination. To illustrate my point, here’s a very brief list of activities which are more fun in a group than playing a card game:

1. Absolutely anything.

All card games are games of chance and therefore there’s no point playing them. They all get dressed up in convoluted rules about aces being high and whoever has the three of clubs has to start and you have to eat a face card on a Wednesday but essentially all these rules serve to do is define who, when the cards are dealt, has the best hand and then to begin the grinding, convoluted tedium of working through them till that same person who had the best hand to begin with is deemed the winner. Why everyone doesn’t just show their hands once they’ve been dealt so everyone can work out who’s won without doing anything is beyond me.

At least that way we wouldn’t have to put up with the recent resurgence of poker which has gone from being the grubby pastime of bored security guards in fingerless gloves battling for matchsticks by candlelight and has been transformed into a pursuit which presents itself as being as cool and as laced with danger as wrestling a tiger while wearing a tux and bedding an heiress/ninja. It’s still just a game of fate, luck and circumstance that these people are gambling on. They might as well play the Biscuit Game and bet on that instead of playing poker. It certainly would have made the first time Connery says “Bond. James Bond” in the casino in Dr No a very different scene if he’d done that.

Luckily, while on a recent jaunt to France with a group of people, I had an escape route when the deck of cards was brought out and the lengthy description of whatever archaic game someone suggested was embarked upon. There was a pool and I had some beer. Even better, I was in France but the beer was Belgian. The French have much to recommend them as a race and country but they’ve still never nailed beer. Their most renowned ale export, Kronenbourg, tastes purely of fizz and misery. Mind you, with all the wine they make, they don’t really need to bother fermenting hops. There’ll be something on drinking wine on my French expedition to follow soon.

La Verdonniers- near Decartes in the Loire Valley. Site of the greatest Anglo-French innovation since Concorde.

Meanwhile, back to the swimming pool and, as a consequence, to the role of alcohol in creative engineering pursuits. Picture the scene- it’s a baking hot day in the Loire Valley and I’m sat in the pool, my normally bleached white shoulders sizzling away nicely. Then, someone lovely brings me a beer- in this case Leffe Blonde, which normally packs a weighty Belgian punch but turns out to be curiously refreshing when chilled and consumed in water as the mercury rises. It’s also 6.6% and so was perfect for engaging with that most British pursuit of fuelling the effects of sunstroke and heat exhaustion with alcohol.

I sat at the side of the pool with my beer and relaxed. Every now and then I’d wander further into the pool, then wander back to the side for my drink. After a while, once my comfort levels had been suitably adjusted to those of a decadent Roman senator, I decided all this going to-and-fro was a dumb waste of my precious time. Surely, with all the inflatables in the pool, I could fashion a device to make my beer float. N.B. any man who is in a pool with a beer for longer than 10 minutes and doesn’t attempt to find a way to make it float along with him wherever he goes needs to be jettisonned off the planet immediately. Seriously. People like that have such little imagination they’d probably play card games for fun.

A child’s armband of questionable origin (since there were no children in the party) seemed like the obvious choice for a beer floatation device. Naturally, every man in the group was drawn into this particular operation as the ideal way to fit the bottle into the armband was formulated. The only other time you’ll see men come together in such a pursuit is at the lighting of and cooking on a barbeque which instantly transforms every male nearby into a nuclear physicist as they group around the coals in a reverential semi-circle saying things like “that sausage needs turning” or “blow on the far corner, it’s getting cool” in an attempt to look like they’re engaging with centuries of wisdom which have been passed down from father to son rather than staring at some hot wood.

Anyway, after much deliberation, trial and error- during which miraculously no beer was spilled in the pool causing the filtration system to explode, we cracked it. If you want to make your beer float in a swimming pool using a child’s armband, simply wedge the beer into the centre of the armband, with about half an inch of bottle protruding at the bottom. Then tilt the bottle to the front of the armband slightly by about 10 degrees. Et voila, a beer that floats. Naturally, you’ll have to drink it still in the armband, which is surprisingly tricky to absolutely master straight away, but it works.

This is what the combination of a beer, a swimming pool and cheap inflatables can lead to. It'd make Brunel weep with pride.

It worked so well that I didn’t move out of the pool for the next 4 hours, by which time I was covered in chronic sunburn which only proceeded to get worse as the alcohol wore off. I didn’t sleep that night, just lay in the bath with my legs in the air and my shoulders under the water. It was agony, like I’d fallen down a spiral staircase made of cheese graters.

Next time, I’ll just play cards.

The day: 12.
The drink: Leffe Blonde
The place: A swimming pool in a farmhouse near Decartes, France
Positives: Made beer float in the pool, for God’s sake!
Negatives: I now have the shoulders of a leper with an abrasive loofer
Conclusion: Beer, sun and engineering do mix.

30 days · decartes · Leffe · swimming pool

Happy coincidences are one of life’s small, unappreciated pleasures, usually drowned out by people screeching about unhappy coincidences: buses coming in threes, running into an ex with a year-long grudge against you, discovering that your girlfriend is just as submissive in the bedroom as you are so your soul is crushed as you realise the rest of your sexual life story will consist of two people laid politely asking if it’s okay to timidly fondle. That kind of thing.

To counteract this wall of whinging I’ll tell you the tale of how today’s challenge came together, and it’s a tale of a happy coincidence. When we came up with the idea for this, one of my first ideas was to have a drink away from people, out of the normal settings, somewhere very much on my own.

The aim was to discover what it feels like to have a beer when you’re truly alone. Sitting in an empty bar in the afternoon is one thing, drinking at home alone is another, but being miles from the nearest human being while you have a beer? That’s something I’d never done. Visions of Ranulph Fiennes gulping down a can of Tennants at 19,000 feet flashed before my eyes. I’m sure Ellen MacArthur kept a sly quart of gin tucked away somewhere as she bounded across the Pacific. I could be next. The only problem is I only had one day to do it.

So how far from mankind could I get in one day? I mused over wandering up to Darwen Tower, or finding a gym in a Scottish town. Happy coincidence saved me from this choice when I realised that on the weekend we’d be starting this challenge, I’d already organised going to Sheffield and I had a day to spare in the area. You only have to go five miles out of the centre to find yourself in the Peak District. For mile upon mile, up there you’re in splendid isolation.

Whipping out the virtual map, it became clear that with a good few hours walking I could be atop a hill in the back of beyond with the only other humans in range being other idiots going to desperate lengths to drink in solitude. And so off to the shores of Redmires Reservoir I went. 13 mostly circular miles to get there, 1,073 feet in the sky, 5 pints on the way and 2 drought-stricken puddles to look at when I got there.

As an aside, the walk up the hill from the west to reach this point was unwittingly one of the best choices I’ve made for a walk in a long time, as the path cuts across the ridge of a valley and lets you see miles of forest. The weather was kind to me which was fortunate as I’d gone dressed like one of the halfwits that Michael Burke casually slags off on 999 for attempting a hill walk dressed like a bedraggled Ian Brown.

Co-Op Honey Ale, a beer which resembles honey much as Stalin resembles compassion.

My beer of choice was a honey ale I’d picked up on a hasty trip around a Sheffield city centre Co-Op. Finding a bench to plonk myself down on, a curious blend of exhileration and exhaustion swept over me as I realised that after four hours I’d finally reached my destination, but I’d stopped for five pints on the way and that isn’t as effective as Lucozade Sport at keeping you going. Sitting back, I prised off the bottle cap with my pen knife, a fact which would shortly prove to be the turning point between the optimism and energy of a steady march up a beautiful English country hill, into a period of bleak depression touching upon thoughts of suicide and the nature of humanity.

All shall be explained in due course, of course, but at this stage my only thoughts were of the beer. I placed the pen knife on the wooden bench and watched as a small mound of foam crept from the bottle, almost begging to be let out. When it seemed to have settled, I took the bottle in my hand and went for the smell. There was none, which made me feel like a man who’d picked up a rock and put it to his nose, which in turn made me instinctively glance sideways to see if anyone had caught me in this absurd act. The rational brain kicked back in and I put the bottle back down for a moment’s more contemplation and a brief photoshoot.

Co-Op honey ale by the reservoir. This felt as effected as me walking round Cambridge with a soft woolen wraparound scarf.

Redmires Reservoir, Yorkshire's third smallest puddle.

Camera work complete, I stretched my weary legs out and took in the reservoir in front of me. Still, serene and quite beautiful, soft arrows rippling across now and then as fish go about their business. A bird hovers high above, searching for a flicker of movement in the fields below. No joy – it sails off into the distance to try its luck elsewhere. A cloud darkens the skies and I’m reminded that I’m here to drink this beer and go home. Absent-mindedly I take a swig but I’m still thinking about that bird and when I listen, the silence has almost become audible. The only distraction from the ceaseless whirring of my thoughts is that bird, and I can’t let it go. As the whirring grows louder I take another swig but it’s tasteless, a slight fizz the only thing worthy of note. My hands grow restless and I pick up the pen knife, flicking out the blades and twisting them around my fingers.

That’s when I notice the people coming up close to my left. Two people, old, ramblers. How they got so close in this silence I’ll never know. I don’t feel the need to act out everything going through my head so I didn’t bother looking right at them; I just kept staring ahead at the silent water. Out of the corners of my eyes I saw them come closer at a sturdy pace, until they neared and the pace slowed to a dawdle. Slowly, so slowly I almost had to look up, they passed in front of me, only twenty feet later picking up their pace again. Under a cloud of melancholy my head dropped, and then I saw why they had slown: idly cavorting the pen knife blade around my hands, I’d ended with it standing across the veins of my left wrist.

Mortified at the alarm I must have caused, I made an elaborate show of doing normal things: standing up to admire the view like I was on the front of the Titanic with Kate Winslet, rooting through my bag with a series of epileptic arm gestures like I’d lost my wedding ring down there, taking a hearty gulp of my beer and making the kind of absurd aaaaahh!!!-that-was-good sound that is only ever actually done by stereotyped men on beer adverts. As they became specks on the horizon I hope those poor pensioners got the message I wasn’t suicidal, because I felt morbid shame for putting that worry into their minds.

Jack Turner's memorial plaque. The feeling of futility I felt while gazing upon this is best likened to the eternal sorrow of seeing an X-Factor audience clap.

Sitting back once again, the melancholy twisted into gloom as the ceaseless whirring became a deafening din in my head. Beer, so often the anaesthetic that quietens the racket, was pulling that two-faced trick it has of occasionally contributing to it. In an attempt to distract myself I turned to look at the forest behind me and ended up staring at Jack Turner’s memorial plaque. Jack (1924-2001) was clearly the kind of man who would inspire those he left behind to dedicate a bench with a view to him. I think, since I was about 13 and began to think like an adult, that has been my ultimate goal in life: I’d like to be a man who is remembered with a bench plaque. The silent dignity of it touches me somehow, and I spent a good ten minutes with nothing else on my mind apart from Jack Turner.

Time passed, and I began to think about the situation. I am not normally this morbidly contemplative of hovering birds and bench plaques. I normally think about these things and then frame them within an optimistic world view that gets me through the days. It’s only when I drink alone that my mind turns to such things. I began to wonder: if drinking to these absolute excesses of solitude takes me to the excesses of pain, doesn’t drinking on my own in moderation make me moderately miserable when I otherwise wouldn’t be? I emptied the bottle and placed it back in my bag as the last lingering thoughts of doing a Reggie Perrin and strolling into the water crossed my mind. With a heavy heart, but with a lesson learned, I stood, took my bag and began the walk home.

The day: 1.
The beer: Co-op honey ale, 500ml, about 4.5% ABV.
The place: Redmires Reservoir, altitude 1,073 feet, no sentient species within 2.5 miles except alarmed pensioners.
Positives: discovered the beauty of wilderness; drank with the certainty no-one could put Celine Dion on the jukebox; further developed my imaginary friendship with Ray Mears.
Negatives: distressed pensioners by appearing suicidal; was unable to quieten the ceaseless whirring in my head with beer; missed the first Soccer Saturday of the season.
Conclusion: if drinking in splendid isolation, DO take a solar-powered radio, DO NOT take a pen knife.

30 days · Co-Op honey ale · drinking alone · gloom · Redmires Reservoir · Sheffield

Here at BadPoo Towers, we’re on a never ending quest to understand beer, and it seems there’s a hell of a lot for us to get our heads around. Luckily, there appears to be plenty of other people on the journey with us judging by the number of blogs and fanzines out there dedicated to the subject. These tend to fall into two categories:

a) Blogs and articles featuring incredibly precise descriptions of ales, often breaking down the constitutent parts of hops, barley, oats, whatever in forensic detail and leaving everyone none the wiser as to what it’s actually like to drink the damn stuff. Let me put it this way; all matter in the universe is made up of elements, including humans who are capable of intense and complex emotions and feelings. But would you look at the periodic table in an effort to understand something like love? No, you wouldn’t. You’d listen to ‘God Only Knows’ instead.

Or there’s:

b) Whimsical reportage of pub crawls, lounge bars and microbreweries where explanantions of what a beer is like to drink are only as important as the surroundings in which they are drunk. Regular readers round here will notice that this is the sort of thing we like to go in for. To get pretentious for a moment, beer is so much more than what’s in the glass.

Which isn’t to say that giving some idea of what an ale is like isn’t useful. We’ve all tried those brews that taste like they’ve been strained through an ashtray and it’s important that decent warning about such pints is disseminated as thoroughly as possible. It’s the only way they’ll learn.

Therefore, starting on Monday, we at BadPoo will fearlessly embark on a new, experimental adventure in beer reviewing. In an effort to gauge exactly what the place of the great ale is in the 21st Century we will review 30 of them in 30 days and in 30 different places. Sure we’ve all sat in front of the telly with a bottle or supped a pint in the local but what is it like to try an ale in the sacred male sanctuary of the garden shed? Why do kids drink at bus-stops? Does everyone feel just a little bit like a tramp when they drink on a train, or is it just me? Is it right for a man to drink beer in the bath? Or in bed?

All these questions and more will be answered in the next month here at badpoo.co.uk. Together, we will establish once and for all not only whether these beers are any good, but just when and where a nice, relaxing snifter can improve life no end. Or make it worse. Or make you feel like a bit like a tramp (or is that just me?)

Join us.

Join. Us.

30 days · Beers