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A god awful mistake

Walking from coast to coast is something that I have been looking forward to for some time now. For years me and my friends have sat down the pub, slightly drunk, with the promises of “Yeah, yeah, definitely next year”. Next year comes and goes and the same promise is made again in the hopes that next year nothing will get in the way of our plans.

Well finally the year has arrived where the organisation has been put in place early, the time has been booked off work and nothing is set to get in our way. We are going. The trains tickets are bought and paid for, the campsites are booked, I’ve bought and read the guide book and now there is nothing else to do but get up on the day in question, stop talking about it and do it.

Cambridge Beer Festival from the air

One thing that has never had to be postponed, however, is the annual pilgrimage to Cambridge beer festival. Every year myself and a few others get up early to battle the public transport system of Great Britain so that we can arrive at opening time to get the most out of our initial outlay in transport fees. Every year we drink probably a little bit more than we should and then we get the last bus home, taking with us out souvenir pint glasses to add to the ever growing collection.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. Sitting in the pub the other day we were talking about the forthcoming walk, I was explaining where it was, how far, and from where to where, all the usual things that people ask. And then Darren say it. “So your not going to be around for Cambridge beer festival then?” As he says it the words hit me and I realised my terrible mistake. I was the one who was organising the trip so I proposed the dates and nobody objected so that’s what I went with. It’s too late to change it now, like I said the tickets are bought and the campsites are booked. There is nothing I can do about it now. I need to make better use of my calendar, scratch that, I need to start making use of my calendar.

Jonny, my walking partner in this expedition, was there at the time and he seemed to have a “oh well, that’s a bit of a shame” sort of attitude. I  really want to go though. I have’t missed it since I started going, so now there is going to be a hole in my glass collection. Not good. Anyone who was there when Darren revealed my error will know that it was more than a week ago. I am only writing this now because I have only just checked the dates on the beer festivals website, living in ignorant hope that the dates were later than usual. They are not.

To make things worse there are a number of smaller beer festivals in the area this in the next few weeks. All of them lie on the same weekends that I have tickets For the Camden Crawl and The Great Escape in Brighton. I had hoped to go to these instead. No such luck there either. I’m not really crying myself to sleep over this in the way that all of the above makes it sound. I’m just disappointed really. I’ll just have to accept that my pint glass collection won’t grow quite so much this year.

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