Next week - flying pigs

It's been quite a week for cliches here at the Tavern. On Monday there was an e-mail at work confirming that a planned Christmas outing to a local beer-tasting venue is to be replaced by an in-house party, thereby proving the popular theory that my employers can't organise a piss-up in a brewery.

And now, the Artful Dodger has explained why he cannot come home for the next few weekends. A keen historical re-enactor, he has secured a temporary role as assistant to a seventeenth-century urban medical practitioner.

In other words, my son has managed to get a job as a pox-doctor's clerk.