This is the calm before the storm. Very little out of the ordinary is happening to distract me at the moment and so I’m free, metaphorically speaking, to stand and stare, rabbit-like, into the headlights of the upcoming Vancouver trip. Predictably, the HR, finance and management drones involved in this whole enterprise appear to be absorbed in other things and so niceties like which flights I’m taking (in exactly one week’s time), where I’m staying when I arrive and what the hell I’m supposed to be doing, exactly, once I get there remain somewhat fuzzily defined.

No matter. I am a professional, and most hotels have bars attached, so I should be fine.

Speaking of drinking on company time (quelle segue!), we completed a particularly arduous deadline a few hours early on Friday, and so decamped to Cruz, down on the Shore of the Water of Leith, for a few self-congratulatory pints. Cruz is the 2007 style-bar refit of the Ocean Mist, a steamer moored at the quayside, and it’s an idiosyncratic place. The Herald certainly thought so, leading to perhaps its best ever bar review:

What Cruz has on its side is novelty. That’s possibly not what they said when a freak natural-gas explosion shook the ship a couple of weeks ago, but it’s not every night that you can enjoy a drink in a place where a wobbly table makes you feel sea sick, the ceiling is only an inch above your head and the circular windows give you a view of the wide-open ocean (OK, the flats across the water).

Although it’s only a couple of years old, the party-like-it’s-1999 website begs to differ, and the place itself already feels a bit dated. The picnic tables on the quay are wobbly almost to the point of collapse and the Guinness tastes like it’s cut with bilge water, but when the setting sun casts a rosy glow over the Water of Leith the health and safety issues just melt away. On an afternoon as nice as that one, Cruz could be replaced by a raft of water-cooler barrels lashed together with parcel tape and it would still be a fine venue for an alfresco pint.