Fancy a pint?

It's Easter Sunday. For the first time in what feels like weeks, there's enough blue up above to make a sailor a natty pair of tailored shorts. I wander down to the village shop to buy a newspaper and then I do something hardly ever do...

... I fancy a pint.

Clarity: I fancy a pint quite often and act upon that fancy with abandon. Just not in the village where I live.

So today I call in on a pub where I used to be a regular. I buy a brown beer and sit outside. Sit under a dirty, knackered plastic sheeting roof. A manic blackbird shrills at nothing in particular. Snow stubbornly refuses to melt on the barbecue. Bar runners wave in the breeze, pegged on a clothes line alongside t-shirts and odd socks and knickers.

A lazy dog refuses to acknowledge its finger-clicking owner. Kids are told to stop doing whatever they're doing out of sight but within earshot of a fence splintering.

I think.

Much of my pub time is defined by specifics. A great saltbeef sandwich. A pint of Jaipur. A range of beers I've read about on Twitter. The prospect of a quality Scotch egg. The promise of a certain cask. Meeting friends. Escaping meetings. Into a festival. Out of habit.

This time? It's just for the fun of sitting in the spring sun, with a pint, with the newspaper, outside a pub. Because I could. Because I fancied it.