It is always pleasing to take a day off and go into London for a crawl on a glorious Friday and drink whilst City types toil in stinking hot sweatboxes. Bollocks they do, they'd all knocked off by about 11am when we made our way to what was our first ever visit to the Lady Abercorn. This is a stereotypical station pub in Liverpool Street station with a big turnover of drinkers. Perfectly reasonable, some decent beers and Lady Grey and Lavender cocktail on and a bit of food. Nice toilets too, in the basement of the hotel part.

Fans of slow service should pay the Duck and Waffle a visit. We went up in the nice lift, took some snaps, didn't get served and left. Such things have happened again although we did get some service a few months later.

Raheem Gherkin-Sterling's fame seems to have no bounds and the eponymous Gherkin building boasts and eponymous Sterling pub. We got there towards the end of lunch hour, gone 2pm, and it was rammed but to be fair it did calm down somewhat a little later and Avril managed a few espresso martinis whilst Rich and I had some beer. As you might expect, being in the bottom of a glass covered office block limits its abilities to an extent but once the crowds have cleared it was pleasant enough and they had a few decent beers on too. Service was notably slow at the busier times because a load of yuppies were demanding cocktails and the bar staff were working flat out to deliver them.

A little bit of a walk next, but one that we had been waiting for and only Rich could get us in. This was of course the Mayor of Scaredy Cat Town. You won't find it mentioned on any pub sign, so enter the Breakfast Club and ask to see the Mayor. You will then be guided through a secret one way door to the basement full of quirky artwork and a toilet plastered with the pages of the Smash Hits annuals. Speciality is cocktails and even I had one in there, something with whisky and egg white and damned fine it was. Fun atmosphere although seats fill up quickly, even though there are not many seats in there, which is probably just as well as you have to wait a while for all these cocktails to be made. Exit through a different and less exciting doorway :(

Just up the road is the Williams Ale House, a normal pub. Really quite extensive once you get inside and with a huge range of beer and cider available. Pleasingly quiet whilst we were in there - perhaps not trendy enough for the city types around here, this is a bit more of a hipsters' pub. I liked it though and we got a nice seat looking out the bay window.

Just up the road is the much smaller Grapeshots, incredibly with an upstairs and a downstairs. This is a definite wine bar, but unlike the image projected in the 80s was not full of yuppies. Nice little pub type affair with wine barrels and other tat around the place, dining room downstairs so stay up unless you need the toilet. A couple of beers on too. Surprisingly decent for a wine bar.

Another bit of a walk back south to the Craft Beer Company. Offices were starting to empty by this point and it was filling up. A small pub (with a windowless basement that we avoided) in traditional, yet hipstery, style we managed to get a seat and try some interesting beer. Some of these concoctions are too quirky for their own god though you can normally find some sort of nice porter available amongst the over hopped artisan offerings. Give me a cask hand pumped ale any day, and to be fair they had a few of these too. Still, it is nice to be able to taste a few different things though for some reason we were enticed by the enormous goldfish bowls of fancy G&T that they were offering too.

An even more traditional pub is the Three Tuns. This is noticeable for its excellent roof garden, and several other levels, reached by steps that are precarious whilst pissed. Managed to just about get a seat though and look out and survey all that was going on down below. They had some decent beers too. Not really somewhere to go when it's heaving though.

Heaving it was certainly not at the Dispensary, which might now be closed. Although we deliberately only went in here to compose ourselves because it was so quiet, to be fair it actually wasn't a bad place at all and had a few decent ales on, and the surroundings were nice and plush and comfortable. We'd had far too much and it was not time to go, so we headed back to Marylebone and Richard disappeared off somewhere to get back to South Lonodn.