(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.