After Hours

The pub lock-in: the last bastion of Englishness in a world gone mad. Or so the movie trailers would say, if for some reason someone made a movie set entirely after hours in a pub. Lock-ins are, of course, illegal, and as such I could never possibly condone them. But if anyone reading this owns a pub and feels like inviting me to one, I wouldn't say no. Mine's a pint of Guinness, and a dark rum and coke for the girlfriend.

There was much dispute over this strip and the following one next Monday. Although Mary and I knew what they had to entail, we weren't entirely certain of the best way to go about it. We kicked around ideas for a while on what the time frame should be until we settled with this one. I was holding out for a strip actually showing him coming into the bar, getting drunk, and hitting on everything in sight, but as it was that would have extended the scene to three parts instead of two -- and this year's story arc is getting longer all the time. (Each 'scene' like this is plotted as a single part -- this lock-in one has ended up as two, however, and the Tara plot point became three parts long. There's a couple of scenes toward the end of the year that we're already certain are going to be much more than a single part. But it will all come together by the end of this year's story, I promise you.)