Once in a blue moon? Not any more.

Seeing as how it is my birthday today, as a token gesture towards the (increasingly tiresome and irrelevant) custom of celebrating the occasion, I have drunk what is likely to be my last ever Blue Moon beer. It was given me as a 6-pack, brought back from the US by the Baby on her last-but-one trip, and eked out since then in a very miserly manner. Regular 😀 readers will recall, since I have harped on about it a number of times, that I first tasted this beer six years ago while on a post-IPW famil in Wisconsin, at lunch in Popeye's Restaurant on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was properly served with a slice of orange, and I became an instant fan, and have sought it out ever since.

Sidenote: we had a little down-time for browsing round the town and, while trying on a top (which I bought and still like), I heard a woman in the next changing room say excitedly, three times, "You're gonna grieve yourself to death!" Still trying to imagine the scenario for that. Also, in April, the lake was still partly frozen and clinking musically with small icebergs - inside which it's apparently possible to find freshly-frozen fish, we were told.

Anyway, I've found Blue Moon in some odd places since, including on tap in the Lord Nelson pub beside the Thames where I saw a couple of cliché red-coated Chelsea Pensioners walking past. The most unexpected place, though, was in the bottle shop around the block from where I used to live in Auckland - what a joy that was! But a few years later, the imports ceased, and that was that. sigh. 

That glass, by the way, I bought in Reykjavik in celebration of the Einstök beer I enjoyed there - that memory, though, always tinged with regret over the four bottles of my airport-bought six-pack that I left, forgotten and unopened, under my seat in the van I did my guided tour in. An unplanned tip for Páll, which I'm sure he enjoyed - but I would have appreciated it more...