As I stepped from the cold rain into the dingy bar I wondered if I had found the right place. I scanned the room and saw three aging barflys, a half-dead, middle-aged female bar tender, and a dog. The woman was smoking, flouting the recent changes to regulations with regard to smoking in bars, but it gave me hope that she might not give a shit about me smoking in her place. She clocked me;<\/p>\n
\u201cEvenin\u2019 sugar. What can I getcha?\u201d<\/p>\n
I thought about this for a moment and decided not to veer too far from obvious domestic brands. Of course if I had found the wrong place I would be leaving, but there was no sense in making waves;<\/p>\n
\u201cBud\u2019n\u2019a shot o\u2019 Blackjack, please Hun.\u201d<\/p>\n
She smiled, winked and went to work. The barflys nodded, as if to say \u2018A young\u2019un but he knows how it\u2019s done\u2019.<\/p>\n
Ten minutes later I was on first name terms with Ted, George and Frank who were propping up the bar and more than that I knew that they all served together in \u2018Nam. Steph behind the bar had apparently been sweet on each of them at some point…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I stepped from the cold rain into the dingy bar I wondered if I had found the right place. I scanned the room and saw three aging barflys, a half-dead, middle-aged female bar tender, and a dog. The woman was smoking, flouting the recent changes to regulations with regard to smoking in bars, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wrUK-dS","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techno-mage.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techno-mage.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techno-mage.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techno-mage.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techno-mage.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.techno-mage.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techno-mage.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techno-mage.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techno-mage.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}