It seems like the people of Bristol aren’t drinking enough at the moment!

It sounds like our favourite fortnightly Friday night out – Four Corners at The Croft, is under serious threat because the bar taking aren’t high enough. It’s true that on some occasions the place has not been packed to the rafters, but when it is busy people tend to be dancing or watching the band, rather than rushing to the bar to get blasted. It will be a real shame if it does close down, it’s always a really social night out for us.

The same is apparently true of The Albert in Bedminster. The Albert is a pretty basic pub, which has built a brilliant reputation for the Jazz and Folk nights, which it puts on. The landlord Ian has attracted some of the best names in the world of modern Jazz to this small pub. However the recent rise in property prices in the Bedminster area sounds like it has prompted the owners into thinking that they could make a lot more money by converting the site into expensive flats. Of course, there is obvious financial logic in this, but the reason why Bedminster has started to become popular is because of places like The Albert and The Tobacco Factory, sure they would all be worth more split up into tiny units and sold for stacks of money, but then the people that live their won’t have anywhere local to go to, so a previously vibrant and interesting area becomes a sleepy suburb again. The curse of gentrification I guess.

We surprised ourselves yesterday. We actually managed to get a radio/cassette fitted into our new car for exactly the amount of money we hoped to pay AND within about 30 minutes of leaving the house. We thought that having a cassette player installed might be a problem as every one wants CD players in their cars these days, but we were pleasantly surprised. We have enough problems locating CD’s, which are spread around the 4 players in the house, without wanting more being suck in the car. Also we don’t have the technology to allow us to burn CD’s so the good old mix tape is fine for us. Of course in a few weeks the car will become littered with unmarked tapes as we load it with our latest favourites.