“Did Ron Weasley pay his tab last night?”

Well a lot has happened since I last got chance to put claw to laptop you lovely lot – where do I start?

The football, that’s where. We’ve never had a telly in the Badger – oh apart from the time that Clarkey guy was on “Wet the Bed” or something – but we were going to change all that. We’d got a big all singing, all dancing ten foot projector screen booked for the World Cup final. It was going to be a day that we’d all remember forever and tell the tale to our Grandbadgers. But no, Croatia weren’t as average as we thought, and sadly it just wasn’t to be. I can’t be on my own in feeling very proud. Proud of the team, and proud of the whole way the country embraced the experience, and in the way we dealt with the oh so inevitable disappointing climax in true British style.

I’ve just realised it’s so long since my last instalment that at the time the outcome of the Harrogate Hospitality awards hadn’t been announced. You may recall Jaks was up for Bar Person of the Year. The evening took place at the fabulous Royal Hall. All the Badgers got dressed up in their finest posh clobber and went to take full advantage of the hospitality on offer, and I mean FULL advantage!! There was a little disappointment when we weren’t awarded the bonus prize of Bar of the Year – congratulations to Christie’s for achieving that prestigious honour – but all that was soon forgotten when the announcement was made for Jaks’ category. Amid unprecedented scenes of jubilation, all the energetic and fully refreshed Badgers piled on stage to assist her in collecting the trophy. A fine trophy it is too. A fine glass trophy. So fine we thought we’d let Deej from the Coach & Horses have a look at what he could have won. Deej then produced his finest impression of a Scottish goalkeeper and the trophy was assigned to a dustpan and brush. All turned out fine in the end though, a new trophy was ordered, and everyone lived happily ever after. If you do pop into the Coach though, please don’t mention what a smashing time we all had – it’s a bit of a sore point.

The doves. Are we the only pub to have our very own gang of feathered friend to grace the skies around our famous beer garden? They bring grace to proceedings. They bring a reassuring sense of being at one with nature. They bring plenty of speculations about whether they’ll move on to somewhere else or start to raise their own baby doves in their amazing dovecote. And they bring a whole lot of sh*t. You’d have thought we’d have put two & two together beforehand and realised that by encouraging half a dozen flying eating machines to spend their days living around a beer garden that seats about eighty that certain consequences would be dropping from the skies. But no, somehow we didn’t see that coming. Anyway, some hastily organised spikeys along the hotel ledges later, and we’ve almost eliminated their favourite bombing locations. Although until the final deterrents have been installed, I’d stay away from tables 25 & 37 an hour or so after dovey lunchtime.

Every now and then we get famous people coming to stay at the pub and the hotel. There’s C-listers, B-listers, and the occasional A-lister. Mostly they just blend in, they are just humans after all. Or some of them are wizards – the look on a couple of customer’s faces this month was a picture when the person they’ve asked if it’s OK that they sit on the same table as is none other than Ron Weasley. Obviously not his real name – Sorry Mr Grint. Anyway, it was a pleasure to look after you and some of your acting buddies while you were filming in the area. It’s not every day the office conversations include lines like:

“Did Ron Weasley pay his tab last night?”

“No, Tara from Game of Thrones paid it for him”.

Lol.