Good times. Good times.

Taken a little after Christmas, here is Henry looking bemused after I reflected upon a tale of lessons learned long ago.

Here I found myself and the little bloke standing outside a licensed establishment that sometime ago had a somewhat less than wholesome reputation. I remember one incident clearly, just before closing, with only the tired and emotional flotsam and jetsam that remains after a big night. Of course, at this point flotsam is threatening to smash jetsam's head in with a bar stool over some trifle incident involving the relative merits of Ian Botham over Imran Khan.

Kinky Friedman summed up Friday nights like this better than anyone else I can think of when he observed

Friday night was the night most people thought they were supposed to have fun. Trouble was most people didn't know what fun was or how to have it, so things usually ended up pretty ugly.

So this particular Saturday morning was the ugly child of another Friday night when this 'lady' with cutoff jeans four sizes too small and bruises on her thighs bigger than the tattoos on her arms came barging in the doors as people were rolling out the doors and asked a philosophical question that has been pondered over the ages.

In a voice that betrayed too many cigarettes, and more miles on the clock than her years would suggest, she asked (bellowed) this particular query:

"What's a sheila got to do to get a root 'round 'ere?!?"

In my tired - and perhaps cloudy - brain, I thought this a good question, a question for the ages. I considered it for a moment, but even before I could address it in my mind an answer had been found.

It appears that on this night, in this place, what a sheila had to do to procure "a root" was bellow "What's a sheila got to do to get a root 'round 'ere?!?"