Breakfast Beer and Bingo

I’ve known the wonderful Mr Bingo for many many years. In fact, this morning, he announced that the freelancing he did for Poke was his first proper creative gig (after working at Size?). 

Anyway, I bumped into him on Friday – he was hanging out in our window with the supremely talented Wilfrid Wood – and we got chatting. He asked me if I was still not drinking (last time we met I’d decided not to drink for a while). I admitted that I’d given up giving up. A nonsense conversation flowed and I mentioned to him that I’d just finished reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.

In the book Mr Walker talks about how it’d be much better if students drank in the morning rather than the evening, from a sleep and memory retention point of view. We formed a pact to meet for a morning beer at the soonest opportunity. Mr Bingo, being a knowledgeable sort of chap suggested The Masque Haunt on Old Street (it opens at 8am for those who are interested in such things).

So this morning we met, we drank a single pint of beer, and we talked a very enjoyable hours worth of nonsense. We covered off a lot of things. From:

• What kind of face is appropriate to make in a photograph whilst drinking a pint at 9am (our best attempt is above).
• Who else frequents such a venue at such an hour? (Turns out all kinds of people. Most of them just having very reasonable breakfasts and coffee).
• How do you start a naive and innocent movement when everything in culture is so pre-meditated?
• Have you ever drunk a 9am beer when not at an airport?
• Mr Bingo’s 2018 scratch-off-the-clothes advent calendar
• Getting older, and the attractiveness of older men / women.
  
• Whether we’d have a good time at Bangface?
• About how those sober morning raves are the antithesis of what we were doing – not that either of us have anything against morning glory parties – I’m quite up for that too.
• Happy Hardcore tape packs and the merits of DJ Sy, Slipmatt, Dougal, etc. I shared The Old School Rave Tape Archive on Mixcloud.
  
• We also reminisced about how, after the first job he’d done for me I took him out and told him he wasn’t charging us enough money. Apparently I used to have scruples, who knew?

There’s something very free about a Weatherspoons at 9am, especially on a sunny day. 

We agreed to do it again in a month. And to bring a guest each. And the next month that guest could then bring another guest. And pretty soon there’d be a Weatherspoons full of nonsense, and affordable breakfasts…