Thread by @Beeestonia

Further to the tweet about The Trip To Jerusalem, a memory from years ago.
I'd been dumped, and the heartbreaker got on her train and out of my life. Forlorn, I did what any choked-up young man would do. I went to the pub. The Trip, of course.

250 million years before that, it rained hard in the Variscan mountains, a vast range that formed the Triassic uplands. The storm dislodged a bit of rock from the peaks, and rather than run down towards the PaleoTythus ocean, washed North into the river system (not actual photo)

Into the Trip, which was thankfully quiet, dipping my head under the low beams. I ordered a pint, possibly Kimberley Dark, possible a cider, and went to find a seat that where I could be lonesome and morose.

The rock made its way gradually North, into the land that is now the British Isles, each fresh deluge sending it a little further along. Around it, the Permian extinction, ending 95% of life. It inched along, as the dinosaurs rose up and ruled. A much larger rock ended all that.

I found the ideal place: upstairs in one of the small rooms. Here I could be alone and reflect on a lost love. I sparked up an Embassy - this was a while ago- and smoked it hoping I looked like a melancholy French writer.

Soon, the rock, now greatly eroded, settled into a giant Oxbow lake, and sank, being crushed under extreme pressure. Deeper it went, as mammals scampered around and started to take prominence, eventually finding two feet to walk on, leaving their arms free to swing a club.

I looked around the pub, the oldest in the world. Probably. The Haunted Galleon, which would strike dead anyone who dared clean it, hung ragged with cobweb and dust. I contemplated giving it a going over with Mr Sheen and testing this curse.

The rock pressed deeper down into the ground, as above it many metres of sediment accumulated. Over time, tectonic forces pushed it back up, and as hominids went from grunting brutes to sophisticated agrarians, it found itself elevated half way up inside a cliff face

Cigarette smoked, it was time to drown my considerable self-pitying sorrows, as thousands had done in this exact spot over the years over lost loves long dead.

The first light in quarter of a billion years struck the rock, as those hominids lit it with tallow candles as they burrowed into the rock. It found itself the ceiling of a cave. The hominids came, and they drank, and reverted to those grunting brutes from not so long ago.

I lifted my pint, and

The rock, after this brief life in the light after darkness, found that its neighbours, who it had been compressed against for so so long, were losing a battle against gravity. They fell, and the rock, after all these years, was once again free, and falling

a bastard pebble dropped from the bastard cave roof that this bastard bit of the pub was built into, and splashed into my pint, causing a tiny splash that nonetheless extinguished my half-smoked ciggie.

I looked at the pebble, now settled into my pint, and felt a sudden urge to cry at my utter misfortune. Instead I started giggling manically, and the day was instantly saved by this meeting with geology.

So vote for the Trip. Except I spent so long writing this thing it's most likely too late.