Despite its unusual name, Bodhran Barney’s is an utterly ordinary large-it-on-a-Saturday-nite boozer for people who have no truck with carpets. Partly because of its “tasty” atmosphere, we decided that we should spend our time there trying not to use swear-words. I don’t know if this was an official forfeit (this long after the event, I can’t remember) but I’ve decided to treat it as one for the purposes of a tawdry graphic.

Just in case you happen not to be familiar with this production, it’s some obscure Australian release which probably went straight to video. However, it’s the only film I could think of (even though I’ve had about nine months in which to do so) which could be lamely associated with our forfeit.

While we were busy not swearing, Tim must have talked me into getting on the cider, as the two of us and Alex tucked into some bottles of Diamond White. Perhaps I agreed to this under some sort of exchange scheme, since Alan – who would not normally turn down a cider – appears to have drunk a Watermelon Bacardi Breezer of his own free will. On the other hand, maybe he was suspicious of the strength of the Diamond Whites: on closer inspection, Tim and I realised that we had been sold two different strengths at the same price. Highly illegal, I’m sure, and I suspect that the staff of Bodhran Barney’s stock a Ford Transit full of booze ’n’ fags in the Calais branch of Tesco’s every weekend. We tried to capture evidence of this fraud on camera, and if you look really carefully, ignoring my ugly face, you can see that the bottle on the left was 7.5% and the bottle on the right was 8.4%. Both were too strong for our own good.

Am I seeing double?

In the bottom-left of that photo you may notice a stack of paper cups. Naturally, we had begun to get hungry again after the unsatisfactory filling of the pies at Mitcham, and we noticed that Bodhran Barney’s had one of those crappy bar-top machines selling “hot nuts” – sand-coated peanuts which are irradiated under an intense light all evening because no-one in their right mind would eat them. Clearly not in our right minds, we became obsessed by our need to crunch on peanuts, and I then spent the rest of our time in the pub singing the words “hot nuts” to the tune of Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff”, which I’m sure entertained the other drinkers thoroughly. No doubt we all followed this with the obligatory debate about whether a peanut is a “nut” at all, or in fact a “legume”.

Meanwhile, on the drinks front, Pad went for a rather safer choice of Heineken, Ian had no fewer than two pints of Whitbread, and Simon – real name Simon Bulsara – had a Murphy’s.

All in all a pretty sub-standard pub, ranking just slightly below the Hare & Hounds as the worst pub of our crawl. Tim’s expression as we left the pub is a direct reflection of his scoring:

The World Extreme Aerobics Championship 2000

One can only speculate as to what the rest of us were up to.

Our drinking plan was now completely out the window: we’d intended to do a pub at Dundonald Road, before ending at Wimbledon in a pub called (I think) the White Swan, which apparently features “an amazing 3-D sign”. But there was no time for such flippant sight-seeing now, and we made an executive decision to head straight for a pub in Wimbledon town centre. In order to preserve the “honesty” of our crawl, however, we resolved to have two complete rounds in the final pub.