AN EVENING OUT!

I went out for a few pints of amber nectar at five o'clock yesterday afternoon. This was the first time I'd been out of a weekend evening for more than a month - normally I can't be bothered nowadays. The Lounge has always been the pub of choice for me, and is a regular meeting-place for friends of mine at Saturday tea-time. But only one of them turned up yesterday. The smoking ban has definitely affected the numbers of people visiting such establishments. Most of the smokers don't bother coming out now, which means that many of their non-smoking friends stay away too.

Whether for this reason, the weather or other causes, attendance at the posher upstairs part of the Lounge (where music is occasionally played by local minstrels) was very low. There were more bodies in the public bar downstairs, where a few people were doing their best to avert their eyes from the television screen, which was showing the hapless Scottish rugby union team being drubbed by the Kiwis. There I spoke to my namesake, the Shetland Times sports reporter Jim Tait, who regularly gets accused of painting my pictures, and I get blamed for his sports reporting!

Upstairs, my friend Colin Jamieson and I proceeded to drink our lager and engage the pretty Norwegian barmaid in conversation, which passed a pleasant hour or so. At a tender age, due to my interest in fishing boats, I learned a bit of Norwegian, so that I could find out more about the great-liners and whalers, from the west coast of Norway, which operated around Shetland. Although I've forgotten much of the language, it still comes in useful sometimes. Nowadays, most of the Norwegian visitors to Shetland arrive in yachts during the summer months - and nice it is to see them too.

My evening out finished, at eight o'clock, with a visit to the chip-shop and a taxi-ride home. I'd consumed a total of four pints of lager. And that's as exciting and over-indulgent as my social life gets now!