(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.