Yesterday, at around 5pm, I had a pint of beer in the only pub in my part of London that I had never drunk in before. In my piece about our Boxing Day Pub Crawl I mentioned that there are only two pubs in my postcode that I had never been to. As of yesterday I have completed the set.

I thought about calling this piece “Every pub in my manor”, with echoes of Harold Shand, the character played by Bob Hoskins in “The Long Good Friday”, but using a postcode to define the area is neater. The postcode in question is London W4 though I am more likely to head to the Raven in W6 than most of the pubs in W4.

The two pubs that were left on my list (and it was a list, that’s how I kept track of it) were the Stag on Acton Lane and The Bell and Crown near Kew Bridge. I went to the former with my brother and my favourite male cousin, visiting from Dublin, just before New Year, and to the Bell and Crown yesterday afternoon with my 12-year-old son. I noted, in that Boxing Day Pub Crawl piece, that my son loves going to pubs and our jaunt was more for his benefit than for mine. Really. It is, at the very least, one way of getting him out of the house on a Saturday afternoon, and this “Sally” (which I have just learnt is a Northern word for a pub crawl) incorporated a lot of walking.

We visited the four pubs located on the other side of Chiswick House Grounds: the Station House (formerly the Grove Park Tavern), the City Barge, the Bull’s Head and finally the Bell and Crown. We headed back towards home via the Gunnersbury (formerly the John Bull), which we had tried to visit twice during the Christmas holidays but found it closed both times. And finally we met my regular Leicester City-supporting drinking buddy at Connolly’s, in time to see his team lose 3-0 to Chelsea. And then we walked home. That’s it for afternoon trips to pub for a while. The list is complete. Sorry, son.