I feel a fantasy book coming on

Picture Credit with thanks: St Giles, Oxford

This afternoon we sat in the Eagle & Child pub in Oxford, particularly famous as the place where CS Lewis and JR Tolkien met as members of The Inklings. The Wikipedia article is interesting. The old pub is pretty ordinary once inside, but is one of those places where 'if the walls could talk' we'd be entertained for years. There was a trio of students at one table discussing some finer points of bio-somekindofengineering, and across the way there was a particarly important lot of professor types sounding awefully awefully important as they discussed something and pulling faces at people coming in and letting the cold wind in with them. For the season, one of the ales on sale today was called Yule Fuel!