Midway through the week of 27th October my bud/associate/contemporary Phil phoned me up advising to join CamRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, lest we end up denied entry to the Norwich Beer Festival we planned to attend on the Saturday. Well, I checked out their website and online registrations were meeting Apache server errors, which was slightly alarming, and the printable, postable membership form provided promised a response within 21 days, which wasn't really promising. So I took a gamble and didn't register.

If I'm honest my enthusiasm for Real Ale has never been that fervent anyway. I'll drink it if it's going but I have a lamentably uncultured palate.

Norwich is an easy enough place to get to from Nottingham although the train is a Central train which means ancient rolling stock with greying carpets and no leg room or air conditioning. The town itself is actually pretty nice. I like a town with a little bit of character to it, a little bit of culture. After dropping my sleeping bag off at Phil's current flat we wandered down. The idea was to kill a few hours looking around the place and then queue up for the 6:30pm evening session.

Killing a few hours in any town always takes a little bit of imagination for me. On a whim we visited the cinema and booked tickets for the handily-timed afternoon showing of Quantum of Solace, on which topic, more later. Then we cruised around second-hand bookshops. Second-hand bookshops are weird kind of alternate dimension, as Terry Pratchett has noted well before me; they do not operate in the same way as conventional businesses and they are substantially more densely packed with books than any sensible library. They're fun places to browse but after a while, I, personally, begin to realise just how small the subset of books which I find interesting is, and how few of these people tend to let go. After four or five different shops I'd acquired a copy of Thud!, which I've read before but don't own in paperback, and a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which I know very little about other than that it's supposed to be smutty. 70 pages into it at the moment. Not seeing much more than what seems to be an archetypal "married woman of high breeding is dissatisfied in bed, falls for working-class nice guy" story as you might find in any of a million modern cheap romantic paperbacks, except relatively well-written, but I guess I haven't finished the book yet.

I probably would have bought more books but there's a limit to what I can carry in the inner pocket of my jacket, which was all the carrying capacity I had. Quantum of Solace seems like a decent enough sequel to Casino Royale. Phil and I took issue with it, though. The main thing we both agreed on was that there was far too little plot exposition. Maybe I'm just too slow on the uptake with intricate espionage and intrigue, maybe I didn't remember the previous movie clearly enough, but it seemed to us that any time there was a moment that we felt like we wanted something explaining a little slower and in more detail, the filmmakers instead decided to blow something up. In fact, whenever Bond had a chance to explain his increasingly outrageous behaviour to his superiors he just bluffed and ran away. And M, the highest-ranking officer in the Secret Service, seemed to be intimately involved at all levels in a job which she really should have been delegating. And it all became a little unclear just what anybody was actually trying to accomplish. And how can there possibly be any tension in any action sequence in which Bond is fighting for his life? And what was the point of that second Bond girl other than to simply get used and abused? And what on Earth was the point of that enormous luxury hotel in the middle of nowhere? And what happened to the second girl in the final fight against that General? And, for that matter, how can we have any sympathy for the Prime Bond Girl if all she does is tell us what happened to her? We saw what happened to Bond. Show, don't tell! Argh.

By the time we left the cinema - Cinema City in Norwich, it is a cool cinema, take note - night had fallen and rain was falling too. The Japanese restaurant we took aim at first wasn't open yet, so we had sausage and mash - very high quality sausage and mash - at the Belgian Monk restaurant/pub. The queue for the Beer Festival was long and by now it was raining quite hard and extremely cold so waiting was a bit tedious. I had the only waterproof coat between us, which we wound up sharing. On the plus side, CamRA festivals have a secondary queue for people with tickets or CamRA membership, and there came a point where our queue was actually shorter and moving faster than this one, which, for my money, made for a successful gamble earlier in the week.

Beer Festivals seem to use tokens instead of cash these days, which seems like a smart move. We met some pretty cheerful Americans in the marquee where foreign beers seemed to be collected (including one which was 25 tokens = £2.50 per half pint, and was categorically not worth it) and chatted amiably about politics while huddled in front of the big heater which was keeping the tent warm. By about 10pm we'd exhausted our initial stocks of tokens and were decently drunk, the good kind of drunk that you get from drinking good quality beverages rather than cheap franchised beer. We staggered back up the hill to Phil's expounding on various subjects, ordered pizza and I critiqued football highlights on Match Of The Day with passion and enthusiasm which I can never muster for the full tedious length of a real football game.

The other thing about drinking good beer: not so bad a hangover the following morning. We think it's something to do with impurities. Maybe I am coming around to this whole CamRA idea after all.