There were three men came out of the west
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die.

They’ve ploughed, they’ve sown, they’ve harrowed him in
Threw clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead.

John Barleycorn is the personification of beer and/or barley and the three men from the west killed him and buried him in the ground.

They let him lie for a very long time
Till the rains from Heaven did fall,
And little Sir John sprung up his head
And so amazed them all.

They’ve let him stand till Midsummer’s day,
Till he looked both pale and wan.
And little Sir John’s grown a long, long beard
And so become a man.

But John Barleycorn springs back to life and grows strong again… until the men cut him down and make sure that he is really dead this time.

They’ve hired men with the scythes so sharp,
To cut him off at the knee,
They’ve rolled him and tied him by the waist,
Serving him most barbarously.

They’ve hired men with the sharp pitchforks,
Who pricked him through the heart
And the loader, he has served him worse than that,
For he’s bound him to the cart.

They’ve wheeled him around and around a field,
Till they came unto a barn,
And there they made a solemn oath
On poor John Barleycorn

They grind up him up to make beer giving John Barleycorn the chance to get his revenge on those three men from the west.

They’ve hired men with the crab-tree sticks,
To cut him skin from bone,
And the miller, he has served him worse than that,
For he’s ground him between two stones.

And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl
And his brandy in the glass
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl
Proved the strongest man at last

The huntsman, he can’t hunt the fox
Nor so loudly to blow his horn,
And the tinker, he can’t mend kettle nor pots
without a little barley corn

The earliest surviving written record is from the sixteenth century but there is evidence that the song and the story is much older – like this twelfth century pub in Hampshire.

I spent a very pleasant day listening to every version I could find – from Martin Carthy to Paul Weller via Billy Bragg and Jethro Tull and The Fairport Convention and many, many more. The best version by far is by Traffic but they each have their own charms.

Turn up the volume and raise a glass to that ancient hero.

Long live John Barleycorn!

Four years ago, I drove up to Portland, Oregon to make a new life and I fell entirely in love with every detail of the city. I loved exploring Portland and I found something new each time I looked.

I have a sense that the Puritans never made it as far as Portland. In San Jose, the mayor is proud that they haven’t handed out a new liquor license in years. They just recycle the old ones. In Portland, the mayor is named after a beer. In San Jose, bars are either dingy and shallow or shiny and shallow and when they die, they are replaced by another just the same. In Portland, bars spring up on every corner and reach for the sky as a tree in the rainforest reaches for the canopy and the sunlight beyond.  Undaunted by the diversity of what came before, new bars are excited and eager to become part of the diverse ecosystem where everyone feeds off everyone else’s success.

I loved the little details of the city. I loved finding the kind of place that has 27 beers on a blackboard, ranked by IBU and scribbled out as new beers are put on tap and old ones run dry. I loved that Portland has more strip clubs per resident than anywhere in the United States and I loved finding myself in the middle of a World Naked Bike Ride and seeing co-workers cycle by with a delighted wave. I loved going to the movies and being brought my dinner on a tray. I loved seeing the real-time display above the bar announcing who had just checked in on FourSquare and I loved that every new bar had three new beers that I had never previously tried.

My favourite bit of Portland was the New Old Lompoc on 23rd St. It was the kind of crappy, divey, dingy bar that is always filled with real people. The Lompoc brewed their own beer and I began with the Condor because I had been warned that the hoppier IPAs would shrivel my labia. Condor gave me cramps in my calves just like Courage Sparkling Bitter did all those years ago and like no other beer since. By the time I was done with Portland, I always looked for the hoppiest beer or the strongest beer on the blackboard, genitalia be damned. In Portland, I found barley wines and even, for the first time in 25 years, a prize old ale at Steve’s wonderful Cheese Shop that took me back to that tiny pub in Horndean.

On my first visit to the Lompoc, four long years ago, the waitress brought me my Portland Dip and a pint of Condor and smiled the brightest, widest smile I have ever seen outside of a Hollywood movie. Last Monday, the same waitress smiled the same bright smile as she delivered my labia-shrivelling Kick Axe at my last farewell to Portland before I departed for my new life back in San Jose. The Lompoc is closing down next week to make way for some nice new condominiums. They tell me that it will reopen in a couple of years, but it won’t be the same. It feels oddly fitting that the Lompoc will close down just as my love affair with Portland ends and my new life begins.

This week, I started a new job with a brand-new startup. The kind of startup where everyone looks at each other and decides whether we should use Python or Ruby or, perhaps, Perl because no one has really thought about trivial details like which technology to use yet. The kind of startup where the furniture is scavenged from a previous tenant and where, if you want to talk to the CEO, you swing your chair around and talk to him. WebMD wasn’t an especially big company but, in many ways, it felt like the biggest company I had ever worked for and by the end, it felt very safe and comfortable. It’s time for something a little more dangerous and exciting.

The title quote, by the way, is stolen from the book I am reading.

Here we go out of the sleep of mild people, into the wild rippling water.

I have seen the movie, Deliverance, three or four times already but no one ever told me I should read the book too until now. The writing sears my senses.

In many ways, it reminds me of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  There too, I had seen the movie so many times that I could almost recite the lines but the quality of the writing in the book just took my breath away. I was totally unprepared for how it would move me. I remember reading a paragraph of Cuckoo’s Nest and putting the book down gasping for breath at the audacity of the words and then rereading the paragraph to check that it was as good a second time. It almost didn’t matter whether the plot was good. He could’ve been writing about turnip farming and I’d still read it with joy for every root vegetable and planting.

Deliverance has that same quality. The movie catches a little of the delight of creating a scene where nothing happens but the nothingness burns into your consciousness as when the hillbilly kid joins Drew in Duelling Banjos. Who has ever seen the movie and forgotten that scene? It has nothing to do with the plot. The plot almost does not matter and those scenes keep coming and coming.

I am just at the point in the book where they put their canoes in the river, a little afraid of what’s around the next bend. For now, they know nothing of squealing like a pig or of what they will have to do to survive as their adventure turns dangerous but they have a sense that something important is going to happen.

I like to think that even if they knew all the things that might happen downstream, they’d still get in those canoes and paddle down that river and enjoy the thrill of the whitewater along with the calm certainty of future success. Anyone who has ever joined a startup knows the feeling of pregnant possibility and the quickening as the ideas swell and kick the new company into life.

It feels great to dip my paddle in new waters and to bend my bow knowing that the shot I fire will change the world. The rednecks hardly scare me at all.

Photo Credit: Naked Bike Ride by Stefan

The smells were occasional at first and they were all quite pleasant. When the pandemic came along they said “Don’t go to the doctor unless it’s serious!” and delicious smells didn’t seem serious to me so I didn’t go to the doctor.

Anyway, fast forward a year and my smells were more persistent. After I bought my fancy raw wool jumper, I smelled dead sheep ALL THE TIME which meant it was time to see a doctor. She sent me for an MRI which said I had a brain tumour.

The doc said my phantoms smells were caused by seizures which is a form of brain tumour-related epilepsy and they put me on an anti-seizure medication which did nothing except give me horrible side effects. They increased the dose which made the side effects worse but did nothing for my phantom smells which were getting worse by the day.

I looked it up on the internet and the internet said that seizures are usually transient and last just a few minutes. Mine lasted all day. Hmmm. Maybe they are not seizures. Maybe it’s something else.

I asked the Lovely Nurse about it and she referred me to an epilepsy nurse. I told her my theory about how maybe they are not seizures and she said “You know nothing, Jon Snow. Of course they are seizures. The doc says they are seizures so they must be seizures. You just don’t understand. And stop reading things on the internet.”

After all this arguing with my doc, I’m starting to suspect that my phantom smells are not even phantom smells at all. I think my olfactory system is classifying real smells incorrectly (parosmia) rather than inventing phantom smells from nothing (phantosmia).

What usually happens is, I’ll have a dominant smell that lasts for several days and everything I smell will smell like that thing. The smell is usually something nice (salmon, tarragon, sausage sandwich, rising dough, liquorice tea, dog treats (yum)) but, occasionally it will be something unpleasant (like dead sheep). I smell coffee and it will smell like dog treats. I smell salmon and it will smell like dog treats. But then the bogus smell will switch to salmon and everything will smell like salmon for a few days.

Earlier this year, I bought a fancy sweater that was made from raw wool. When it arrived it smelled of dead sheep and lanolin and Mrs Clown would not let me keep it in the house. For weeks after that, everything smelled of dead sheep. That was the final trigger for me to go see a doctor; I could handle smelling popcorn at random but dead sheep was a smell too far.

The smells are getting more intense and I can’t trust my sense of smell to tell me the truth anymore. It has started to affect my taste now too. One by one, I’m losing my enjoyment of the foods that I eat. Mrs Clown often makes me an English muffin with ham, cheese and egg but today it just tasted like a dog-treat sandwich. Dog treats are nice but I prefer ham and cheese and egg. I put lots of ketchup on my muffin to hide the dog treat taste which made it edible. Fortunately, ketchup still tastes like ketchup.

Some tastes are still fine. Tea still tastes like tea. Wine tastes like wine. Beer still tastes like beer most of the time but, if I try a new beer, about half the time it will taste of dog treats. Sometimes it will taste like delicious beer with a hint of dog treats.

One of my favourite beers is Fuller’s Vintage Ale. The bottles have a ‘best after‘ date and the beer gets better with age. A fresh bottle costs about six quid but matured bottles are closer to a hundred quid. I had two bottles of 2020 ale that I was saving for better days but I suddenly realised that I need to drink it soon before it turns into dog treat juice. So, today, I sat in the sunshine with my special chair and my little dog and I opened my bottle of 2020 vintage ale. It tasted like delicious vintage ale with just a hint of dog treats. I think I drank it just in time.

I mentioned before that I am going for a biopsy this week. There’s a chance that if the biopsy says I have a particular mutation, I will be able to have chemo but, to be honest, I’m not even sure I want to do that. I just gots to know. I’m not particularly worried about the actual biopsy surgery — they will drill a one-inch hole in my skull and pull out a bit of brain with a needle — but I am getting nervous about what the biopsy will tell me. Fortunately, it will only take several weeks to get the results (Thanks, Tories! Whatever happened to that 350 million quid per week?).

Fingers crossed, eh?

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For more than 25 years now, I have been convinced that the second best beer in the world is Fuller’s Extra Special Bitter despite all evidence to the contrary.

ESB took the title from its little brother – London Pride – when I ordered it by mistake. At that time, Pride was hard to find even in London and, recognising the pump handle from the doorway, I ordered a pint without reading the small print. The deliciously rich rounded taste that I loved so well was strangely more complete and more intense than I remembered and my love for ESB was born.

When I moved to New York in ’94, the state of the beer market was pretty dismal and I had my only sustained period of drinking crap beer since my career began in 1978 (I drank only wine and milk for two months in Australia in ’89 for fear of permanently damaging my taste buds with their insipid swill). I shudder at some of the piss that passed my lips in those dark days.

After the cold winter of New York, California’s microbrews were a soul-warming blast of sunshine and they renewed my respect for the progeny of John Barleycorn.

In my home country, American beer was always thought of as something of a joke – an oxymoron almost. But the incredible array of tasty beverages in every bar buried that long-standing truth deep underground. Even the now-mass-produced Sierra Nevada is worth returning to. Anchor Steam – which, with Sierra, helped rescued American Beer from the Laughing Stocks – deserves a special shout-out. I especially recommend it with mushroom, jalapeño, kalamata olive, anchovy and extra cheese pizza.

The Bay Area even had Fuller’s ESB which I ordered out of nostalgia. I still called it The Second Best Beer in the World even though I was disappointed every time I tried it and I tried it many times. The pubs just seemed to not give it the care it required and from a bottle it just tasted… well… wrong. ESB was like a childhood friend who had grown up to be a dick. I wanted to keep in touch to rekindle the flame of my memories but I had no desire to spend a lot of time with it. I stuck with the California microbrews.

But the best California microbrew was actually from Oregon and an almost-emigration to the Land of the Hop Monster changed my beer drinking habits for ever. Portlanders don’t like too much beer diluting the taste of their hops and when you first arrive, you wonder how anyone can even drink the stuff. As my friend says, it’ll shrivel your labia if you are not man enough. After a while though, you wonder how anyone can ever drink anything else.

I have tried drinking Portland-style beers in California but they just don’t work. The first time, I thought it was the weather – I accidentally drank an IPA once after a couple of hours of football in the hot sun and almost had to call an ambulance – but no, controlled experiments have shown me that it is not possible to enjoy strongly-hopped beers in the Golden State.

I still look forward to my visits to the rainy north for the welcome assault on my gustatory system (and the pleasant company!) but when I come back south the beer tastes as dreary as the Portland weather. We have already established that I can’t drink Portland beer down here, so what is a fellow to do? Go back to wine and milk?

I discovered the answer a couple of weeks ago.

We had a family crisis and, as with most crises, we decided that it was best resolved by going to the Britannia Arms. Well, the pint of Fuller’s Extra Strong Bitter that they served me that day transported me instantly to my misspent post-adolescence and to the banks of the River Thames at Chiswick. As if the surprisingly hot wood-nymph from Disney’s version of The Firebird were lovingly caressing my taste buds back from the ravages of devastation, I wanted to soar on wings of delight.

Welcome home, my long lost friend.

Epilogue

I have done several controlled tests since that glorious day. I have had ESB several times and it has been marvellous each time. I have been careful not to overdo it – as with a promising relationship with a new girlfriend, you don’t want to spend too much time with her for fear of ruining something delicate – but our relationship is holding up rather well.

I even tried it at home. From the bottle, it’s awful but pour it into a proper pint glass and Fuller’s ESB reclaims its rightful place as the Second Best Beer in the World.

Hooray, beer! Hooray Fuller’s!