The Sun

I left work early today to get in a training run before meeting up with a friend for a drink.

I had, it has to be said, completely underestimated how warm it was. Seven and a half miles under an unforgiving sun left me very tired and dehydrated. I'm a carb avoider normally but when I went into The Sun to I couldn't resist drinking lager.

I like The Sun. It's the building on the right in this photo. However, it's never recovered the allure of its heydey, when it was run by a chap called Andy Wilkinson. He was an excellent publican. On Friday nights, pizzas were a fiver, so you'd go in there after work and after a couple of pints decide that there was no reasonable argument for not simply having a pizza and spending the evening there.

Saturday nights it was like being at a gig, two deep at the bar, but you'd see loads of people you knew and it was always the place to meet up before going on to dinner or whatever. And Andy was brilliantly supportive of the town: when the OFSTED inspectors went in there after inspecting the secondary school, he gave them each a free drink and told them how great the school was for the town.

Then, at some point in the late nineties, he sold up. A company from Manchester bought The Sun from him on condition that he wouldn't open another bar for eighteen months in Kirkby Lonsdale.

They brought in their own staff, doubled the price of the pizzas (perhaps thinking Andy had been missing a trick) and within four weeks the clientele had been decimated. I went in with a friend of mine at nine o'clock one Saturday evening and we were the only people in there!

After eighteen months Andy did open another bar and, should you ever visit Kirkby, I'd highly recommend popping in: it's called Avanti. Oh, and the Manchester crew are long gone. The Sun is now run by a rather pleasant couple and the food is excellent.