The Chough, Salisbury

Just to clear this up, a chough (pronounced chuff) is a crow-like bird that loves fishing grubs out of cowpats. Oh yes it is.

A completely foul night weatherwise last Thursday - flashfloods all over Somerset, and raining so hard I drove all the way down the A36 with my nose pressed against the windscreen, trying to stay to the left of the oncoming headlights. This had better be worth it...

The pub turns out to be an enormous sagging Tudor mansion of a place, with a bewildering number of rooms, antechambers, vestibules and corridors, plus several staircases that move around by themselves like the ones in Hogwarts, making every visit to the Gents an adventure. Despite all this ample space, we have to set up in a tiny alcove by the door, partially blocked by a pillar. Nige & I nearly disembowel each other whilst trying to tune up in 4 square feet of floorspace. Never mind, the place apparently "gets heaving" on a Thursday night...

Well, whaddya know - it doesn't. In fact, after we finish our first set (to the sound of some desultory clapping from some unseen punter in the furthermost reaches of the pub), the guv'nor tells us we might as well call it a night and pays us off! First time this has happened in 18 years! As we load the last of the gear back into the van, hundreds of punters materialise from nowhere and stream into the place, lured by the Now That's What I Call Happy Hardcore 58 that plays on a continuous loop... we make a quick exit before the guv'nor changes his mind.

Still, the Tesco over the road was open, so we could still get a few beers to take home - which just goes to prove that every cowpat has a nice juicy grub in it if you look hard enough...