the art of doing nothing

after an insane week at both our jobs, adam and i decided the weekend would best be spent practicing the art of doing nothing. however, we didn't want to just spend the day on the couch watching the idiot box, as my grandmother used to call it, so we piled into the truck and drove 20 minutes through kent to a little village called chipstead.

chipstead was like walking into a holiday brochure for something very quaint and very english. little semi-detached houses lined the streets, with sweet front gardens packed with flowers, and ceramic tiles to mark the house number/name. nestled in the middle of this adorable village was a neighborhood pub called the bricklayer's arms.



the pub was small but offered two leather sofas for us to lounge on (i know, we traded sitting on adam's sofa to go sit on this one) and even better was the fact that bricklayer's is a harvey's pub. i have never had any harvey's beers so i was eager to try something new. everything on draft appeared to be bitter, which i'm not a fan of, but i found a nice light-tasting-but-dark-coloured armada ale. adam ordered a shandy since he was driving and we both settled onto one of the comfy little couches, where we curled up with the saturday telegraph.

yes friends. i actually left the ipad at home and spent the afternoon reading...a printed newspaper. what a delightful experience this is. the smell of the paper, the impossibility of folding any of the pages up the right way again, never finding the section you were originally looking for but discovering something new instead, black fingers. reading the paper is something i rarely have time for, unless i manage to snag a copy of the financial times on a BA flight (BA gives you a nice selection of free newspapers). perhaps this an indulgence i should consider more frequently given that it is such a cheap thrill...