Did you know that? It is a quote from a visitor’s review of a ‘pub’ that’s not that far from my Cotswold home, though not too near, thank the stars. I am hardly likely to go to a pub started by a rather mouthy media personality who was sacked by the BBC for thumping the producer of Top Gear. However, dogs are welcomed there, I gather. The following picture of a pub sign is not from that pub, but I like it and the Two Fat Blokes kindly gave me their permission to use it here. You can find more of their excellent signs at https://twofb.com/.
Now, I really thought I knew what a pub was, after all I have spent a significant proportion of my adult and teenage life in them. Why, I even came quite close to running one once, and both my wife, Margaret, and I have served behind bars. Ha!
But perhaps I’ve got pubs all wrong, so I looked up the
definition in that source of all knowledge: Wikipedia. And this is it:
A pub (short for public house) is in several countries a
drinking establishment licensed to serve alcoholic drinks for consumption on
the premises.
Hmm, so perhaps the reviewer is correct and pubs are not all
about food. Following that the Wikipedia article quotes from CAMRA, an arcane organisation
that started in the 1970’s and which should know a little about the pubs of
today. It states that a pub has four characteristics:
- · is open to the public without membership or residency
- · serves draught beer or cider without requiring food be consumed
- · has at least one indoor area not laid out for meals
- · allows drinks to be bought at a bar (i.e., not only table service)
I would add this to that last point …and perhaps consumed
there whilst chatting to the bar staff, other customers, and anyone else
willing to indulge in alcohol-infused conversation.
Often when I am in non alcohol-infused company the
conversation turns to pubs and I listen to these interchanges very carefully.
The basic format is something along these lines:
“Have you been to the Loyal Oak at Aylesbury?”
“No, what’s it like. Is the food any good?”
“Its really nice, the chairs are comfortable and the service
is good.”
“And the food?”
“Excellent, they have a famous chef there now, you know that
chap who comes on the telly talking about grilling acorns.”
Then someone (me) intrudes on the conversation by asking:
“What about the beer? Do they have handpumps? Did they have
a guest ale or are they tied to a brewery? Are dogs allowed?”
They both look at me shocked and, after a puzzled silence,
the person who had been to the Loyal Oak in Aylesbury replies:
“Well, I don’t really know. We don’t drink much – driving
you know. Just a glass of red or white with the meal perhaps. Oh, and we don’t
have a dog.”
It is odd to recall that most pubs did not serve food in the
past - bag of crisps or a pork pie if you were lucky. Eating out for most
people was a rarity and took place in a restaurant or a hotel or a café often for
birthdays or a wedding anniversary.
When we first moved to the Cotswolds (actually back to the
Cotswolds for Margaret) the nearest pub was the Cold Aston Plough, and my wife informed
me that in the 1960s this was the first pub in the area to serve food: that
much remembered delicacy called chicken in the basket. By the 1990s, when I
briefly became a local there, it was very much a food destination until we
drinkers arrived later in the evening. The then landlord told me that it was a soulless
place before the drinkers arrived, no sound to speak of except the clinking of
cutlery and muffled conversations.
So what did that man who wrote in his review, “Pubs are not
all about food, you know,” refer to? No, it wasn’t beer or alcohol or dogs. Pubs,
he claimed, are “about how they make you feel”.
Now, I thought that this was what the alcohol was for! It makes
you feel good, gets you talking rubbish to other drinkers and lets you go home
happy. However, I must now concentrate more on my feelings, or get a dog.
