Towards the end of Half Term, we had a few days away in Pickering. It's becoming a preferred holiday destination: not too crowded, close enough to the coast if we want to see the sea, but with lots of nice countrysidey things to do, particularly the wonderful Dalby Forest, just around the corner.
Sam and I also enjoy the Pickering Museum, one of those places that offers a time capsule trip into the past, to a world that looked like this...
A far more civilised, genteel and altogether less horrible time like this...
Personally, I haven't been in a public house for quite some time, though we did stop off at one for a family meal recently, and after buying a glass of wine and two soft drinks, I was horrified at how little change I got from twenty quid. I don't know how you regulars cope - I'd just be thinking how many CDs I could buy instead...
Possibly the most exciting thing about Pickering Museum though was the sign which read "Free Coffee". Wow - two of my favourite words combined... it doesn't get any better than this, surely?
(I remember back in 1994, when Nelson Mandela spoke to the US Congress, quoting the end of Martin Luther King's most famous speech: "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last!" The radio was on in the background, but when I heard those words, I turned it up to see if I could catch which shop he was talking about.)
The Free Coffee sign was next to the exit, but that was OK. The promise kept me buzzing all the way around the museum. It would be the perfect climax to our visit!
"But you just had a coffee before we came in here," Sam said.
Ah, the young. "Imagine if the sign said 'Free Football Cards'," I told him, "and I said to you, 'but you just bought some football card before we came in here..."
"That's different," he said. And he was right. Football cards offer a transitory pleasure, at best. While coffee is the gift that keeps on giving.
As is so often the case though, the reality rarely lives up to the dream. (Just ask Martin Luther King.) The free coffee was dispensed by a 40 year old Klix machine (a true museum-piece), a mixture of hot water and undissolved granules that tasted like... well, I'm not sure the words have been invented. I poured it away after the first mouthful. There's no such thing as a free coffee.
