To celebrate this they have issue a special 250 year brew, which I tried in "The Onley Ale House"just outside Washington DC.

Well it was shite, it was for all purposes the stout that my Grandfather used to drink out of the bottle, at least that had a taste, this had nothing.

So if you are offered this or see it in a bar resist the temptation, dish water would have more taste and character.

On the other hand, I enjoyed a few ordinary Guinness both in Washington and New York, and they were as good as here.

Link to image:

Ok done with the game now on to the subject of fish ... loch fyne by name loch not so fyne by nature.

Having waited in anticipation for a meal for 3 we went for the much advertised daily specials .Daily left overs more like.After an acceptable starter of fishcakes and  calamari,the childrens meal didn't arrive as promised.

Eventually after prompting a goujon of fish (more like a stumpy thumb) with pre salted chips arrived.SaLTY but still prepared to give the benefit of the doubt.Maybe an enthusiatic chef with a heart condition trying to get rid of all the spare salt by hiding it in childrens chips. 

......Forgot to mention .! It was waitress changeover time as we were informed , so maybe that excuses our problems.

Then having emptied the bread basket,woo hoo a surf and turf !A  medium steak (i.e no blood) arrived loking like it had done an olympic opening ceremony and got stuck in the flame with a few overdone soggy nasty shrimps  in shells.(£18)

Then a lovely (or so you might think) lemon sole .I think they had mis spelt the menu and it was really a melon sloe with extra spiky bones and a few nasty bruises on his way to the oven.(£18)

Luckily our manager Sarah ...(aka yts trainee) was prepared  to give us some useful antidotes to our problem,so we wouldn't feel scared to visit again.

The options;

.....Coffee on the house

...Desserts ,

or money back.

I ask you dear readers ,

Which one do you think we chose! 

Under the microscope I thought the creature bore a a slight resemblance to Tesco CEO, Sir Terry Leahy, but it may have been a trick of the light. Gosh, I hope he's not doing anything despicable on the food.

The message is simple. It's a girls product. Guys don't eat it. I am a guy, I shouldn't eat Activia yogurt. I wrote to Danone for clarity. A spokeswoman from the UK Danone Careline responded to my email saying it was "fine for men as well". Rather than being assured, the reply made me more apprehensive as it read more like "you shouldn't have any side effects you freak".

I have dropped Activia from my shopping list since seeing the advert. The email did not attempt to get it back on there. I guess men eating Activia is something they can't be seen to condone. If you are male and eat Activia consult a specialist, you need help.

The response from Danone:

Good afternoon

Thank you for your e-mail. Activia is fine for men as well as women.

The core target audience for Activia is women aged 30-45+. This is why we advertise with women only, around this age. We are aware that men also consume Activia, but understand this is low compared to the number of female consumers; hence our advertising is targeted at women. We have not ruled out men in advertising and this is something we may do in the future.

If you don't upgrade your phones you're meant to get a discount. I've never had one. Occassionally my monthly bills top a £100. Am I on the right plan? Who knows, all this marketing gibberish about Dolphins, Racoons and Panthers is just too confusing.

In any case, the issue is international calls which are normally out of plan and where the Mobile companies rake it in.

If I'm away in Cork it's 38pence a minute to make a call, 19pence a minute to receive a call and 25pence to send a text message. From the UK I call Irish mobiles and at the end of every month I am left with unused minutes and unused texts which only roll over a month. Orange keep the rest.

The good news, I found a way to do it for free. All I get charged is a local rate call which gets swallowed up in the unused minutes I lose every month. Mobiles in all the countries listed below can be called for free...

Ireland, USA, Autralia, South Africa, Canada, Belgium, China, France, Spain, Argentina, Austria, Bahrain, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Poland, Romania, Slovnia, Skovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK

The company doing this are called Rebtel. With a name like this they should come from Cork, but they don't. They're based in Stockholm, and it's easy to get started.

Next thing I need to find is how to make free or very low costs txts, anyone out there in Neverland know the answer?

I decided to carry out a little analysis of my bills to see if I was getting the best value for money from the tarriff that I was on. When I was reviewing the data that I could get my hands on from Vodafones website I noticed that I was calling and continue to call 1890 numbers.

1890 numbers are shown on many advertisements and documentation to be low cost numbers, well they are not if you use your mobile.

My tarriff gives me a monthly allowance of 200 minutes of calls to any network and landlines in Ireland, and I find it hard to meet this on a monthly basis, and usually have minutes carried foward to the next month, yet I still get charged for calls that I have made to 1890 numbers at 25c per minute, which does'nt meet my defination of cheap or low cost.

When I called Vodafone to ask why this is the case, "Its always been like that" was the response, I asked could it be ascertained why 1890 numbers are not part of my monthly commitment? "I'll need to find out and get back to you" I'm still waiting, and have a feeling will be waiting for sometime to come.

Another thing I noticed that Companies and Government Agencies, such as the Revenue Commissioners, print these numbers so that you can contact them cheaply, but they never print an alternative number ie an ordinary landline number, which I can assure you is part of your monthly flat charge and you won't be charged extra.

One would have thought that 1890 would be part of "any network" but it would appear to be apart of "some other network".

www.charlesletterman.com

So what's the problem? They're animals! There are plenty of starving people in Africa who'd be happy to eat them! This probably isn't a response you'd expect, but would it be more acceptable if I was talking about chickens?

They live for thirty nine days, never see natural light, constantly feed to make their commercial weight, are overcrowded, get painful lesions on their legs from sitting in their own faeces ("hock burns"), and are starved for eight hours on their last day to have a clean gut before ending up on our shelves in Tesco at two for a fiver.

This is the story Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been describing on Channel 4 this week as he tried to convert  Axminster into Britain's first free range town. His experimental chicken farm contrasted differences in welfare, and in taste, between factory reared and free range. The free range chickens, he said, are "out here in the grass, doing what chickens want to do."

I would like to think, and I'm probably in the majority,  the surviving horses in Amersham would have a similar fate and were free to run around a field, but when it comes to chickens people just don't seem to feel the same. They're chickens, they'll buy two for a fiver.

Having been saturated with the TV advert I stopped in front of them in Tesco only to be perplexed as to why there is a bag of chicken which  tastes like Chinese spare ribs. Are Mattesson set to expand the range into the rest of the crisp flavours so that we can eat chicken that tastes like beef or prawn or bacon?

What happened to eating an apple or dunking a digestive?