(Just kidding) Like parents — or how we imagine them to be — we are immensely proud when one of our snotty brats achieves recognition for the things at which they excel. And in this case, Oor Tom has been featured in the My Favourite Table section in Wednesday’s Dom Post Capital Life supplement, being recognised for two of the things he does best: sitting in bars, and drinking.

... but you will at your peril serve this man a cocktail containing ice chips.

I added that thought-balloon, imagining Tom sitting gamely through his location shoot with a photographer (one Chris Skelton in this instance, back from whom we’re waiting to hear about permission to use this photo), the interminable exposure of the digital equivalent of several rolls of film, barely controlling the gin-related drool emanating from the corner of his mouth. And all the while, a rapidly-tepidifying Martini waits. (He was in reality probably thinking far more lofty thoughts, such as how to solve the Buckle Street to Airport transport corridor problem.)

Tom has actually been accused of looking too respectable in this shot, as though the perpetrator of a dastardly bar fly bait-and-switch. To the indicter his retort:

If they’d photographed me after our Tuesday night red wine gay bar binge, it might have been more representative…

So it appears that he scrubs up well. And, over the course of several hundred words with Kimberley Rothwell, the dashing and apparently unusually virtuous-looking Mr. Beard details his love for Duke Carvell’s in Swan Lane, and well and truly outs himself as a urban designer, writer and bar afficionado, not to mention a café-sitter, a people-watcher, a cocktail-fancier, a Euro-cosmopolitan-lifestyle-appreciator — in short, a self-proclaimed flâneur. All the things we like! Huzzah!

Did I say already that we are immensely proud of Tom? Did I also mention how we are immensely grateful for the opportunity to affectionately take the everlovin’ piss out of him? Share the love: you can read the entire piece here [PNG, 931 KB; click on the image to view it at full size]. And if it ever appears online, we shall link to that too.