I don’t even know why we bother going into this place. Ordinarily I’d use my stock answer, “spite”, but a trip to the Edinboro Castle is totally an exercise in self-humiliation.

As many other posters have indicated, it should be a very reasonable boozer. It’s quite a roomy, airy building and the beer garden’s widely known for being one of the nicer ones around.

The range of beers looks promising, and when we were there a promotional poster announced that bottles of wine were sold at crazy discount knockdown prices if it happened to be raining outside. The more cynical reader might speculate that instead they’re just jacking wine prices up ridonculously when it’s sunny, but hey.

We’ve been attempting to enjoy this pub for several years now, and the problem is always the same – getting service is impossible. I was in on a Monday night, and there was virtually nobody around: just myself, another guy further around, and a girl in the process of being served. Quite what the barman was doing is anyone’s guess, although it was definitely full of sound & fury. 4 or 5 other bar staff flitted past behind the bar, ignoring we impotent would-be drink purchasers. Maybe they wouldn’t serve us because they were too young? Who knows.

It seems a silly thing to go on, and on, and on about, however the base function of a pub is to be able to get some drinks & then go and relax in whatever atmosphere the venue provides with your friends, and all I can say is i you’re planning a trip to the Edinboro Castle then make sure that whoever’s going to do a bar run has plenty of free minutes on their mobile plan, because that’s the only way you’re going to get to chat to them.

This pub has been a local to me in a home and a work sense in the past, and despite several inexplicable bits of renovation and a number of passing years, the synopsis has to be: FAIL.

Unless you want an airy room to sit with your friends and not drink. It’s an absolute boon in those stakes.

** Special mention goes to the kitchen, by the way, for taking so long to figure out that we’d ordered & paid for food, and to work out how this offering might be prepared, cooked & served, that when we went up to enquire 40 minutes later they bluntly asserted that the kitchen was shut. Bravo. Presumably all the kitchen staff were flat out doing something behind the bar.

Check out my review of Edinboro Castle – I am mrfrisky – on Qype

In this world, you can’t go far wrong with food that starts with a flat circle of stuff. Pizza is awesome. Pancakes are awesome. A kebab can get you through in a tight situation. Pasties are quite popular, and that’s just a Cornish pizza that’s been folded in half. And I ain’t met nobody who would ever say no to a decent Burrito.

Though Tortilla was a little hard to find initially (if you approach it from one direction all you can see are the signs for the Health Club rather than the source of Mexican goodness), and it looks like the kind of mainstream chainy type place that lovers of fine lunchtime cuisine tend to avoid – once you’ve tried their burritos I almost guarantee you’ll be back.

In fact, the ordering process on the 3 times I’ve been there in the last 6 days does have me wondering what element of the presentation I’ve missed. Despite signs around showing you what the workflow & options are, I still feel like the staff are making it up on the spot. But even then, IT’S SO GOOOOOOOOD!

The food’s fresh, tasty, affordable, healthy-ish, and did I mention tasty? I’m yet to master the art of eating a heftily-sized burrito without sending my Mexican spicy rice distributing itself all over the table and up the arm of my shirt. The chicken and the pork have been incredibly flavoursome – with that woody/smoky flavour that you don’t get anywhere near with “bing cuisine”.

The restaurant – well you wouldn’t really call it a cafe? – is quite spacious, and has all the atmosphere of an airport departure lounge, although to their credit they haven’t spattered it with spray-on Tex Mex kitsch, preferring just to get on with the business of making tasty lunchtime nosh.

These things might not even be very authentic, but damn they’re good. I’m going back tomorrow.

Check out my review of Tortilla – I am mrfrisky – on Qype

I think this is the first review I’ve ever written whilst still on the premises…

When you get a nice spacious, airy room filled with magnificent beers from around the world, and then put a bunch of friendly staff behind the bar, you’re on the way to having a sure-fire winner. If a review were simply about the pub, rather than the experience one has whilst there, then this’d be a safe hit into 5-star country.

Am going to have to mark it down a star though because of the frustration involved in going along on a sunny Saturday. Firstly, it fills up *really* quickly, and it’s a completely personal bias, but it fills up with the types that I wouldn’t usually be sharing a pub with. Probably the worst aspect of this is the rude encroachment and the increasing shouting, until your nice “meeting a friend for a beer” at your table turns into a cramped screaming match.

The bar staff were very helpful, but in places unnecessarily bureaucratic – we arrived at 11:45 and wanted to order breakfast and run a tab. Firstly the barmaid had to go & ask whether they started serving at 11 or 12, then she said that we could only order via table service, and then that we had to order food to start a tab. Given that it was the same girl who eventually came to our table (and how at the time there was nobody else there), I can’t see why she couldn’t have just taken our order & started our tab.

But that nonsense aside – The White Horse is a lovely environment, and has a nothing short of spectacular range of beers (Continental & American beers, as well as well-maintained Real Ales). The food’s nice & not overpriced, and if you could time your visit on a day where there was a large horse-related carnival just outside the M25 you’d probably find it to be a very pleasant environment.

Check out my review of White Horse – I am mrfrisky – on Qype

I love it when friends of mine are involved in innovative public-facing software projects -- for example, my mate Warren’s involved in the highly cool Sapphire plugin for FrontRow on the Mac, Chisel’s developed a Perl-based forum product called Parley, and recently I discovered that a coworker from the old days has branched into the Twitter client space: which is what I thought I’d tell you about.

Previously I’d used the fairly excellent Adobe AIR based Tweetdeck for my desktop Twittering -- the multi columnar display makes life immeasurably easier for keeping track of groups of tweeters -- however I found it a bit irritating moving between my work PC, desktop computer at home, and my 2 laptops (MacBook & my “pocket sized travel computer” -- the Asus Eee): Tweetdeck’s *supposed* to allow you to save your config information on a server so that you get the same view no matter where you log in, but in practice after about 6 months I couldn’t get it to cooperate as it was meant to.

Look kids! A product logo!

And then Justin suggested I have a look at Pluggio.

The clever little bunny’s gone & produced a web-based Twitter client, and I -- for one -- think it’s awesome.  An instant advantage of being web-based is that there’s no need to install anything, and the config’s the same no matter where you access it from, meaning you can just get on with using the tool for the purpose you want to, rather than wrestling with how to get it to do stuff.

In addition to that, though, there’s some pretty cool features -- here’s the ones which I’m mainly using:

1) Pluggio supports multiple Twitter accounts (up to 5 with the Basic(/free!) account): it’s pretty handy to be able to send & receive for my personal account, our morris dancing team’s account, and the one for our whisky club from the same client.  Previously I was using Tweetdeck for mine and then Twhirl for the others.

Don't cross the streams

2) You can group users together using Twitter lists, or set up stored searches on certain keywords, or individual users -- I refer to these as “streams”.  Each of these can be set to automatically poll for new results at a specified interval: the way you receive new message notifications is by an “unread” count next to the stream.  The twin beauties of this, I find are that not only can you see when there’s new tweets there for you to read, but it doesn’t constantly thrust new content in front of you autonomously.  A big problem I had with Tweetdeck was that if I came back to it after a few hours I’d have no idea what was new & what wasn’t -- you could mark messages as read, but it was a bit of a pain in the arse.  The second thing I like about this approach is that it keeps the memory footprint of the app down: again, a problem with Tweetdeck I found was that over the course of the day the tweets would come in & live in memory, and bring my poor machine to its knees (particularly with several columns of tweets open).  Tweetdeck shows you it has new tweets, then when you click on a stream it fetches the 20 most recent.  When you scroll down it goes & gets the next 20, but it won’t go & get the new ones until you click on the stream again (at which point you’re back to the latest 20 again).

3) You can schedule tweets -- I don’t use this particularly often, but it’s nice to know the scope is there, for instance if you were launching a campaign or something, you could line up multiple simultaneous tweets from various different accounts, or if you were a frequent news re-poster you could spread them out over the course of a day so as to give people the impression you’re goofing off less than you really are.

4) It’s really easy to follow people from within their tweets, and organise them into lists, without having to go into another screen or run a separate search.

5) You get easy access to your Direct Message tweets.

6) Because of the hierarchy-style organisation you don’t feel like you’re wasting screen space.

7) And a huge plus is that the whole arrangement feels so personal -- Justin responds to emails, and has a support community system on the go so people can suggest features and generally feel involved if they want to (after all, this is social media).

When I first started to use it the initial problem I had was that I exceeded my 1000 API calls per day limit the first couple of days, however this was mainly because I was accustomed to Tweetdeck’s constant stream of incoming tweets, and I therefore thought it necessary to refresh each stream every 2 minutes: having organised my streams into Friends, News, Techies, Comedians, Celebrities, Bloggers and Booze, this meant my Pluggio client was hitting the Twitter API 210 times an hour automatically, plus once every time I clicked on a stream manually.  Having relaxed them back to 10 minute checks, I’ve since not hit the 1000 call limit at all -- which leaves scope for me to set up a couple of 1 or 2 minute checks if there’s a particular topic I want to go after.

Another problem Justin had shortly prior to my joining up was that Twitter shut down his access to the API completely (back when the software was called Tweetminer -- he changed it to Pluggio in early April once he realised it could be used for total world domination, not just Twitter), leaving the thousands of users he’s got in the lurch completely.  To his credit though he operated an open & transparent policy of letting everyone know what was happening, and after a short negotiation was soon back on deck.  It seems odd to promote a company on the basis of a service outage, however I think he handled it really well and the userbase agree.  I also think it’s admirable that anyone can see the userbase & usage figures at any time on the Pluggio Stats Page.

There’s a whole raft of features which I haven’t even looked into yet, but when I get a spare minute I’m going to have a look at the helpful “howto” videos that Justin’s provided explaining how some of the more esoteric stuff works.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MS7GoM4I-g

One of the things I noticed which looked kind of cool was the ability to bring RSS feeds right in as a stream, or to run an ongoing Google or Yahoo search, and to be able to turn those results easily into tweets: pretty hefty time saver if that’s what you’re into.

Also it integrates with the Ping.fm API, so you can use it to post not only to Twitter, but every other damn service out there too!

As well as the free accounts, there’s various levels of paid accounts as well for heavier users of the service -- I don’t really engage with Twitter in a full-on marketing kind of way, but the Social Guru package sounds like it’d be pretty kickass for anyone who’s involved in this space as a full-time concern.  From what I’ve seen, I reckon it’d give HootSuite a bloody good run for its money!

In summary: if you’re looking for a better desktop Twitter client than you’re currently using, give Pluggio a go for a week or so.  It doesn’t suck.

(probably worth restating very clearly here: Justin’s not paying me for this endorsement -- I just reckon it’s a really, really cool app)

(probably also worth mentioning that the post graphic was another one of my patented awesome self-drawn jobs -- TOTALLY worth the time & effort, wot?)

Photo borrowed from Kake Pugh / Flickr

London – Eating & Drinking – Pubs & Bars – Pubs

No matter how hard I try, I really find it hard to actively LIKE the Bree Louise.

The first thing people usually point at is the marvellous array of marvellous beer – it’s like there’s a permanent beer festival going on in there, with 4 or 5 beers on handpump on one side, and then another 5 or 6 on gravity dispense over the other side (“gravity” is the other name for when a beer cask is mounted on a rack, table or shelf, and then the barman opens the tap on the bottom & pours you a beer straight out – in case you were wondering).

Yes it’s highly commendable to have all those beers available, but that doesn’t automatically make it a good pub. I’ve had many pints in there, and some of them still come out tasting a little bland. Not BAD, as such: they’d more than certainly give you a replacement if that were the case.

A feature of the place is that CAMRA members get a discount (50p per pint I think), but that seems a little unfair I think: if you were going for rounds with 3 friends then their rounds would all cost £2 more for exactly the same product. Of course it makes members’ eyes light up, and possibly contributes to attracting the superlative reviews we see. (disclosure: I’m a CAMRA member – it’s not a jealousy thing)

If you look around and ignore the beers, what you’ve got is a fairly tatty & dingy saggy-ceilinged room, stuffed with tables that are the wrong size for the space they’ve got (and you can test this by trying to walk through from one door to the other when all the seats are full – a lot of the time you can barely open the door adjacent to the toilets get into the place, and approaching the bar with the handpumps on it usually prompts the typical apologetic do-si-do). The toilets are the most barely provided functional arrangement, periodically wafting parfum d’urine through the premises. The last 5 or 6 times my friends & I have been through there we’ve chosen to sit outside at the picnic tables rather than lap up the ambience inside, and this was over winter.

It’s not that I can’t stand the place – my point is that on balance it’s a shabby-to-OK boozer, which does an excellent job of providing range & quality of real ale.

Perhaps another summary worth considering is that “If you were looking for a pint or 2 of real ale in the Euston Station area, it’s the place you’d most likely head to”, rather than “If you were planning to go out somewhere for a night in a pub, you couldn’t go wrong with this place”.

If I was going to rate it on the beer, it’d be a solid 4. As a pub, I’d say a 2. So lets agree call it an overall 3.

Check out my review of Bree Louise – I am mrfrisky – on Qype

Previously my exposure to such things was chiefly being an audience member at recordings of various comedy TV & radio programs, such as QI, Have I Got News For You, The News Quiz, Old Harry’s Game, The Manifesto, The Unbelieveable Truth, Just A Minute, and I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.

In this case though we (HC, Neonwombat & I) stepped a little outside of our regular remit and had a go at audiencing for BBC Radio 3’s “Discovering Music” series.

Absolutely excellent.

Radio 3 is in the main the BBC’s classical music station (it does other stuff as well), and it has a rich history of recording its own performances of classical pieces – but in addition to the straight performances, there’s a host of informational programmes, and that’s where Discovering Music fits in.

It'd be a bugger to dust though, wouldn't it?

The piece that we were listening to was Dixit Dominus by George Friederic Handel.  My only prior experience with Handel was the ubiquitous Hallelujah Chorus, and his Coronation Anthem “Zadok The Priest”.  Based on this footing my opinion of Handel was therefore that the core of his work was based around him being a fairly bombastic arse-kisser.  Admittedly, if you’re composer to the King it’s probably in the interests of your tenure to produce pro-kingly material.

St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge was the venue – obviously a church is going to provide the best setting for a piece about how amazing God is, as well as having a good acoustic – and the best way to describe the crowd is probably by the observation made fairly early in the proceedings that I was the only person in the building sporting a t-shirt.  The orchestra were St James’s Baroque, and the choir were the amazingly talented BBC Singers.

The format of the evening was that firstly the description of the piece was given by the host (a chap in a coppertone tie whose name escaped me), and as he worked through the various sections of it he had the orchestra play a chunk – sometimes together, or sometimes bringing out the individual lines.  This very much reminded me of the “exploded view” diagrams you see in car manuals, giving the observer a better understanding of how the individual parts look, and how/where they fit together.  For further expertise the compere would often go to the conductor, who in this case had credentials involving Westminster Abbey – I assumed quite prestigious and scholarly, and inferring from the detail of the answers he gave, this was very much the case.

Not only did the talk describe what was happening in the piece – in terms of the composition of the tune, harmonies, dynamics, rhythm and movement of motifs & themes throughout sections of the choir & orchestra – but also gave a great sense of texture and context in terms of the composer’s life, such as what his experience would have been up until that point, and a sense (in this case) of the fact he would have possibly been either showing off or trying to impress the Italian composers with whom he was working at this time.

The latter section of the programme was a complete play-through of the piece, which was perfect as it allowed you to revise what you’d just heard, and see if you could spot the things that the compere had explained – as well as enjoying the work in total.

What an excellent show – I look forward to keeping up with future editions, and wading through the archive of past recordings.  Already I’m excited to have spotted a programme on one of my favourite pieces, Gustav Holst’s “Planets” suite (needs Real Audio to play).

* or, indeed, hackle

“Fish & chips” is an interesting cuisine option – it’s almost universally invoked with a modicum of enthusiasm, and is very much regarded as an English cultural cornerstone – and though it’s ostensibly a simple meal, there’s definitely a huge variation in quality. One thing that’s always puzzled me, in fact, is how people maintain their enthusiasm for fish & chips from their local chippy when it’s obviously terrible.

Having walked past The Laughing Halibut many-a lunchtime to see a queue stretching out the door and towards the corner of the street I was keen to give them a try and see what the fuss was about. With so many nice places to choose from in the immediate area, why on earth would you line up for 15 to 20 valuable minutes for a meal which flies in the face of popular health wisdom, with an eager look on your face!?

Turns out – I discovered, making a special weekend trip in – it’s because these guys really know their way around a piece of cod. Crispy golden battered fish sits amid a sizeable pile of chips which, once I’d gotten them back to the office, were suitably crunchy (without being crispy) and tasty as well! (My chip vocab is a little lacking) They weren’t the sad anaemic looking excuses you sometimes discover next to your fish. Similarly, the fish was tasty, with just the right thickness & texture of batter, and – perhaps it was coincidence – not a single bone.

The whole thing seemed quite well-priced for the amount of food you got – probably a serve of chips & 2 bits of cod could satisfy 2 people, and set you back somewhere in the region of 10 or 11 quid. There’s other types of fish there, but I’ve not had the chance to get anywhere near the menu since that day, so you’ll have to go find out yourself.

There’s a good reason why The Laughing Halibut’s a local point of reference when giving directions – it’s been there a good few years now, and judging by the following they’ve got it’ll be there a few more yet.

Check out my review of The Laughing Halibut – I am mrfrisky – on Qype

Out on a Saturday evening’s pub-skylarking with a friend we found ourselves in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, and I have to say – I was very impressed!

Photo borrowed from teamaskins Flickrstream

Initially the heat from the fireplace seemed oppressive, but that was possibly in contrast from the frigid chill we’d come in from. As our eyes adjusted to the stygian darkness of the front bar we managed to find a couple of chairs and thought “Ah well, this is a tourist pub – we’ll just grab one and then be on our way”.

2 hours later we were still there, having shifted to pints of ale with port chasers & chatting to a few punters who’d rocked up – we met a couple of lawyers from Lancashire, and a couple of tourists who had romanced across 4 continents. Maybe it was the fact that the pub – erected in 1667 – claims to have played host to a couple of hundred years’ worth of literati, such as Dickens, Twain, Voltaire, and Dr Johnson, and so visitors entered eager for it to present a memorable trip and experience, rather than just another nice old building to stand in, look at, and walk out of again.

As we sat, sipped & extemporised more than one new group of tourists ingressed – typically a shivering & slightly dejected looking gaggle led by an excited young man in front clutching a guidebook: and all of whom warmed up nicely, put away at least a swift half, before returning to the arctic Fleet-Streetian wastelands.

I can’t comment on the quality of food, as we only supped of the hop & vine. The pristineness of the toilets was remarkable – we suspected a recent renovation, but in contrast to the ancient smoke-stained walls upstairs, the loos were almost hospital-like!

Having read other reviews here complaining about short pints & whatnot – the “standard” beers are dirt cheap (as Sam Smith’s pubs always are), so getting 1/4 of an inch more head on your pint than you’d like isn’t the end of the world… either let them know the tide’s out, or quit whining.

Realistically, the joy in this pub’s in sitting back soaking up the atmosphere & ambience and enjoying a snug fireside chat – so get to it! It’s a treasure.

The only regret I’ve got is that the darkness in there was so impenetrable that I wasn’t able to get a decent photo of the front room. And it had nothing to do with all the beer I’d drunk, honest.

Check out my review of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese – I am mrfrisky – on Qype

We recently bowled in here for a Sunday roast whilst in the neighbourhood – as a visitor from the far North I’d often heard of The Union in the wilds of Greenwich, and was quite pleased with what I found.

The main drawcard of this place is the beer: the tap selection is almost solely the preserve of Meantime Brewery, London’s excellent artisans of the brew. There were around 6-8 interesting looking beers on keg, and 3 further ales on handpump. We tried several of them, and they were all very tasty & fresh tasting – the Smoked Bock was an interesting find, the Wheatbeer had the fruity character of the German variety it’s based on, and the handpumped London Pale Ale was sheer hoppy, piney joy in a glass!

That's a pub interior, alright.

The building itself seemed cosy enough, but with a slightly modernised edge to it: perhaps it was the blondwood finish of everything; it definitely didn’t give off the vibe of Old Man pub.

We ordered Sunday lunch, and whilst initially thought we might’ve been screwed over on portion size (I seem to recall the roast being £12?), although it was all very tasty and by the time we’d finished we felt just on the pleasant side of being farctate. Which left room for more beer.

The staff were friendly and helpful: the barman mistook my indecision over which beer to try for confusion, and set about describing the different styles, which he did very capably and clearly without sounding like a prat.

I’d happily swing back through there – no questions!

The only downside is that it didn’t seem quite as cosy as the Richard I next door. Otherwise: nice battle cruiser, this!

Check out my review of Greenwich Union – I am mrfrisky – on Qype

The Speaker is a neat, cosy little bolthole tucked away in Westminster – a perfect place to be snugly installed with a pint of real ale when the freezing rain’s lashing down outside!

If it were smelly (it isn't) you could call it "The Sneaker"!

A favourite of nearby officeworkers (and often, parlimentarians), if you arrive much after 5pm – or at any time on a Friday night – the chances of finding one of the few available seats is fairly minimal. You would never call The Speaker a spacious place.

The selection of real ale is always excellent – often featuring beers from the Dark Star brewery, but even when you’re not lucky enough to see one of them the lineup’s seldom a disappointment. And the landlord knows what he’s doing. It’s not an Ale Pub by a longshot though, and there’s plenty of the usual pub fare to please most punters (as well as, I’m told, quite a decent wine stable – no doubt a small concession to the tastes of the visitors from Westminster).

A traditional “woody” pub which avoids the “old man pub” dinginess with brightness & character, and the fact it’s always quite busy accurately reflects this.

Check out my review of The Speaker – I am mrfrisky – on Qype