If I were to tell you that this month's :here pub crawl involved a man wearing nothing but black thong dancing on top of a piano, someone being forced by the police to go and apologise to a pub landlord, the smallest pub in York, drinking soap and the entire party being refused entry to Toffs then I bet you'll wish you came. You should have...things got messy.

Sticking with our unofficial policy of visiting random old men's pubs that we've never been in, and are never likely to enter again, we began the night's carousing in Walmgate's Five Lions. Despite the fact that we were sober and that there were only six of us at the start the staff and handful of drinkers who were sat at the bar bombarded us with suspicious looks. If there was a record playing somewhere then, rest assured, the needle would have skidded off as soon as we walked in. It was that kind of place. The interior had a couple of glass cases hanging on the wall containing broken clay pipes, playing cards, coins and other bizarre tat. Bizarre tat that could easily escape your attention when confronted with the two hundred-odd Toby Jugs lined up behind the bar. Objects that I've always found depressing and slightly mad...and, strangely, they don't become less so when grouped together in a frightening pottery army. I hate to be negative about the places that we visit but the beetle-browed attention paid to us by the landlord really was over the top. And it wasn't made any easier by the fact that he looked exactly like Freddy Boswell from Bread...it felt like we were in a weird Carla Lane police state. The final straw was when Nosedivers bassist, Swagger, committed the heinous crime of picking up a Babycham leaflet holder and was swooped down upon by old Pa Boswell and sternly told off. So we sodded off.

Sodded off across the road that is, to The Red Lion - which was warm and friendly with an open fireplace, exposed beams and lots of wood panelling, (God, I'm sounding like a holiday brochure). Not that the inside was completely without it's foibles - every spare inch of wall was covered with some 18th century painting and not only was there a wreath on the wall but we also discovered an attractive bowl of sticks. Whilst admiring such features, as well as childishly playing with a horn thing hanging from the ceiling, we greeted a load of late comers to the crawl. Which boosted the number of crawlers to 20-odd but didn't bode well for the next pub on our list - the minuscule, 'look my mum's put my pub in the wash', Blue Bell.

Before getting to this pub there were a stream of jokes about how it was a 'serious' drinkers pub and that our staggering mass of beer-engorged :here people would never fit into the place. In actual fact The Blue Bell turned out to be not only just the right size but by far the friendliest and most accommodating bar of the night. Bearing in mind that by this time we were all acting a bit silly, landlords ????? and ????? were really cool. They took photo's of us, didn't mind that Justin showing his arse scared off a couple of regulars and ignored us taking the piss out of their snooker club photo's on the wall. You get the impression that The Blue Bell is a place where people who really really like their beer go, and, unlike our previous two pubs, there was no attempt to shove incongruous bits of pottery around. Instead a few photo's of regulars and a couple of certificates sufficed for decoration. And if you do pop in to this jolly splendid pub, make sure you visit the toilets to see the most archaic hand dryer in the world. If The Blue Bell could be said to have had an 'anything goes' policy then our next destination, The Last Drop Inn, could be said to have a 'nothing goes' policy'

An impression gained by the prominent sign, in this brightly lit and fairly empty pub, which read along the lines of 'No Jukebox, No Kids, No Laughing and No Fun'. Or something. Although the absence of music in a bar would please my Gran, silence is not what your typical gang of young York rakes enjoy...so we asked if we could play their piano. The stern reply came back 'Yes. As long as you play it properly'. Well, if a continuous version of 'Jump' by Van Halen whilst Justin strips down to a small, black Kiss thong and dances around constitutes 'playing it properly', then I'm pleased to report we obeyed their rules. Further stupidness in this bar involved emptying liquid soap into pints and daring each other to drink it and deciding that it would 'be nice' to go to Toffs.

Except they wouldn't let us in. Something about the wrong kind of trousers - which, bearing in mind this was only a Monday night, was hard to believe. We strongly suspect that good old Freddy Boswell had been on the pub pagers to tell everyone about the Babycham incident. Of course it probably didn't help that one of the crawlers was busy, elsewhere in the city, helping the police with their inquiries concerning a stolen Union Jack.

But the night was once again helped along by the Blue Bell who we returned to in order to get a packet of fags - and ended up getting sixteen pints in carry outs from. And so the party continued...