Mind Streaming

Saturday, February 15, 2003

The English Pub

Second left in this image is a traditional pint. You have either a handle or on the extreme left, the straight pot which these days is far more common than the handled traditional pint. (1 pint=.568 litres) To me the pint pot, with a handle, is essentially the way an Englishman ought to get his beer. The other two glasses are alien imports.

The word pub is an
abbreviation of public house, not to be confused with the word inn, which is, however, generally a pub these days, but technically, and if we are being pedantic (which I am here) should have both accommodation, food and alcohol in its brief. Inns come from the highwaymen days, when British roads were uncomfortable, cratered dirt tracks, journeys were long and dangerous and stagecoaches required relays of fit horses if your destination was ever to be reached. (Check out Tobias Smollett's hilarious Humphrey Clinker early novel on this one, literary minded peeps, for more on the joys of early British travel conditions way back. Tobias, by the way, is considered the father of the modern novel.

The Turk's Head:

A genuine English inn, near my home town of Weymouth

on the south coast of England



Inns were the places which stabled fresh teams of horses and where passengers could be accommodated overnight, aled and dined, at modest costs. Most of our roadside pubs, in remote rural areas at least, the real ones I mean, were in former times, roadside inns in the true sense of the word.

If you prefer, the pub you adjourn to is the one you are known in. (Cheers as it were, but with a bit of history actual history to it!) Within a square mile of where I live there are ten pubs, mostly small ones. Some are specifically geared to younger people of legal drinking age, and which I studiously avoid at all costs. (A rite of passage for local teenagers, by the way, and in fact nationally, is to reach sixteen and run the gauntlet of, I am legally 18, let me try and buy a beer in the pub and I thus confirm I am an adult even though I am actually lying about my age! I managed it, being, genetically, a very large person even then, but to some it begs public humiliation!

The loud music and the rowdy lads and lasses slurping back bottle after bottle of designer label drinks is not my thing. In the last few years we have seen the development of binge-drinking as a new leisure activity, amongst young men and women with a bob or two to spend (slang for a tenth of our Pound Sterling in the old days) on having a good night out and a parallel growth in the number of places which have been deliberately designed or modified to accommodate and profit from their revelry. For them, the measure of how good the night out is commensurate with the degree of difficulty they have remembering it, the day after, it seems to me!

Some modern, that is, recently built,
pseudo-oldie-worldy pubs call themselves inns, which along with the plaster cast beams and carefully selected reproduction antiques, is an unsubtle attempt to recreate the ambience of former days with generally little success. They are actually the work of some tarty interior designer with wads of corporate cash, modifying (read destroying) an original pub that isn't making enough money, or starting from scratch. I have seen, in more than one instance, let me tell you, these bizarre creatures at work. There is such a bitter irony at work here. Original pubs with their dado rails, Victorian plaster-coved ceilings, their upholstered, turned mahogany-legged comfy leather bound settles, their etched windows, their natural wood bars and shelves of little collections of eccentric knickknacks (that made such places unique) were skipped away, the place completely gutted, and then, Hollywood comes to town. (Skipped/skip, by the way is a large metal container that you hire, put your junk in, and then a lorry arrives, jacks up the skip, and takes it to the refuse dump.)

Some tame architect is commissioned to create more selling and drink consuming space from the old layout, and some other newly qualified dimwit artificially recreates that old world charm, which has just been trashed, in order to increase buck revenue from the punters. Ha-Ha.

I prefer my pubs to be original, probably owned by a small private brewery, one of an increasingly rare breed, that hasn't been swallowed up the few, huge, predatory leisure companies that today dominate what we now call the hospitality industry.

My favourite pubs haven't been touched for yonks.( a long time) One of my real favourites is left as nature intended, largely because the small independent brewery that owns it and a chain of other small pubs in the Manchester area, is in fact reported to be too tight (miserly) to actually want to modify any of them. My old pub, (marital end, moved on, don't go there anymore), occasionally will get a visit from the brewer's painters and decorators to restore the heavily embossed wallpapers to white gloss and then are not seen again until the smokers have turned it sufficiently caramel-coloured to require repainting. Brand new pub and inn designers
often use recycled bricks and reclaimed timbers to create the illusion of a history that extends beyond last week. They are essentially synthetically tailored premises for taking more of your money. Alas, pubs and inns are now, almost universally under the control of a few global conglomerates who dominate the drinks' trade and own the premises where their drinks are purveyed.

(You'd think Guinness, for example, is
essentially, Irish but see who owns the brand name now, and it isn't anyone with an Irish name!) What were traditionally unique drinks are now just brand names on a particular conglomerates growing list of financially captured products, to be marketed worldwide with, actually, no real sense of responsibility. Drinking has to be made to seem an attractive pursuit, and they target younger people in this regard almost exclusively, to increase sales; the politically correct, mission statement rhetoric on booze selling corporate web sites, in respect of anticipated moderation, is complete, hypocritical bullshit, it seems to me.

There were, in the North and elsewhere in England a vast number of independent local breweries that made their own beers. They owned the pubs and the pubs were tied. They employed, franchised, landlords and landladies who are obliged, contractually, to sell their beers and other home grown drinks and no others. I know personally, of two couples, who were sacked by their employers for illicitly selling other brands for their own profit, something a tied landlord does for personal gain but with dire consequences when you are caught out. There are
other premises which we call free houses, that is they are not tied to a particular brewery and therefore sell a much wider range of beers and spirits.

When you enter a pub, over the door you will see a sign proclaiming that x or y are the named persons, the landlord or landlady, licensed (by local magistrates [lay judges] who also dictate the opening hours), to sell intoxicating liquors. Hence the expression, licensed premises referring to pubs and bars where alcohol can be consumed essentially, from a legal point of view, on the premises. An offlicence is where drinks can be sold (booze stores for
example ) that must be taken off the premises to consume. Incidentally, only recently, it has become an offence to drink alcohol in certain areas on the street, and these areas are determined by local legislators to combat the increasing nuisance of people, I guess mostly younger ones, drinking in the street.

I remember the days when pubs had a special small bar or hatch, or even separate door where you could buy drinks to take away, off license. Locally the booze shops, which seems to grow in number weekly, are known as the offy. Booze stores are big competition for the pubs and bars these days, the sales of wine and spirits, bottled and canned beers, and lagers for home consumption, have risen dramatically and spirits and wines in particularly are much cheaper in such outlets. It is possible to get out of your head for £5.00 with a small bottle of spirit. That might buy you two pints of beer in the local pub, depending on where you live! Alcohol is a very interesting legally available highly potent and addictive drug it seems to me. It can cause a host of terrible things to happen, do a lot of personal and public damage when misused, and in one sense, pubs, bars and off-licensed booze
stores are a kind of dependency centre for some people. To our government, that addiction, (and tobacco as well, in its various forms) is a potent revenue earner, and each budget seems to increase the tax on them year by year! This is very important because our National Health Service needs the revenue to fund health care for those affected by it. Cannabis on the other hand, well need I say more, as an aging hippy, remains classified narcotic and illegal but tax free if you can get it.

One of the essentials of a traditional pub, that is the pub in original form, was the sale of two different types of locally produced ales which were barrelled in wood and later steel or aluminium kegs, brought to the pub cellars by what were and still, are called draymen and then piped up to the bar. Traditionally, a hand pump was used to suck the stuff up from the cellar and into your beer glass, although these days, compressed gases,
sadly, are used in the main. Thus a person behind the bar will pull you a pint.

BEER HAND PUMPS (WHITE HANDLES
HERE)

These ales, those from the wood, keg or
barrel are either my personal favourite, bitter beer, or the darker mild beer. The gassy, light coloured imported lager beers were originally only available from bottles, although these days many are on tap as we say, at the bar. (Tap is faucet to you, if you are an American.) I tend to categorise lager and American style beer drinkers as the
younger end of the market and the more traditional beers as being the
preference, as a general rule, of the more mature (in the age sense at least) pub drinker.

The consumption of lager, as opposed to
traditional ales is, in terms of my age at least, a relatively new culture. Indeed a whole new cultural/ genre has been created through the irresponsible consumption of lager, and manifests itself in the law courts and in shaming news reports where our hooligan subculture members get completely tanked up (drunk, legless, plastered, pissed, out of their skulls, etc) and disgrace themselves though anti-social behaviour. I speak of course of the lager lout. It seems ironic that many of these English people, usually young men, are inclined to be somewhat racist, behave shamefully in a chauvinistic way abroad, at international football matches for example, but their indiscretions are not fuelled by ales native to home but by the very brews actually manufactured by the nationals who they are abusing at that particular time. What is increasingly of sociological interest at least, is the way in which female youngsters, of drinking age, seem inclined to behave equally outrageously in small groups ,determined to spend the weekend between the working week, in a drunken stupor. These behaviours are often seen at their worst on holidays abroad, where bars are open all hours, alcohol is cheaper, and guys and gals are equally disgraceful in bringing the nation into disrepute and where host nationals despair at the their irresponsible use of alcohol, the activity which seems to me, to be the chief aim of some young Brits at least, holidaying in such places.

Now, thus far, it may seem to you that,
having written all this off the top of my head (with no additional research at all) I seem to know quite a lot about the subject. Some of this is personal experience of a life time, nearly forty years of visiting pubs in various locations, but not generally as a daily or even weekly ritual but an occasional visitor for the most part. I actually spent my formative years in a house very near to a traditional local brewery that served a large area in the south of England. Those buildings have now been Disneyfied, sadly, and have become a principal tourist attraction in the seaside town where I was brought up.

I still remember the shire horses pulling dray wagons and loved watching wooden barrels being cleansed, the coopers actually making and repairing beer barrels and the blacksmith shoeing the horses and making barrel bands. I loved the place and was saddened when the haunt of my youth became, effectively a theme park. I can still sense the smell of boiled hops, part of the beer brewing process, the aroma that hung beautifully in the air of my childhood, not only from the brewery chimneys but also from the small holding plots of land which kept piles of waste hop chaff to enhance the Dorset soil. The smell isn't there any more, the brand has disappeared, but the original buildings, or what is now left of them, still bring back some of the sensations.

And what can you expect inside a traditional pub? That of course depends on whether it is a long established premises or a new one, where you live and who now owns the premises and what clientele they are pitching to attract. You should know that, in fact many pubs these days are pretty dead certain days of the week, with just a few faithful locals, dutifully holding the fort. Increasingly, pubs have been forced to think more carefully about ways of filling the place and so we see karaoke, live DJs, Quiz nights and live bands, all attempts to drum up patronage on slacker days of the week.

The Traditional Dart Board
/ favourite pub game

In my day, God, I sound old, we had a darts board, a bar-billiard table, or a crown green bowling green out back or a full size snooker table or tables upstairs or a skittle alley (not a pool table in sight) to help you while away an evening as you downed a few pints of bitter. You could ask the landlord for a pack of cards and buy pickled eggs or onions at the bar. They had a juke box in some of them.

BAR BILLIARD TABLE

The Manchester Log End Dart Board.
This requires extra precision in dart throwing, is made from a real log end, and thus has to be immersed in water when not in use to prevent cracking.

In those days there were distinct sections in the pub. There was the public bar, or in the North, where I am now, the Vault, and the lounge. Working men and locals who wanted to spit and swear, in their work duds or everyday clothes used the public bar or the back room, or vault, played darts, billiards and watched T.V. The lounge was a bit more posh ; you took your mother-in-law there or your girl friend probably in your best clothes. The prices varied a little from bar to bar. Women were often excluded from the public bar (vault) in those days, it was men only understood and you'd probably have been thought of as a kind of whore if you plonked yourself, as a women, in the public bar/vault, but that might just be my rich imagination.

Addendum

This is the first part of a two part piece about pubs. In my next entry I confirm that I have in fact a criminal record. To some extent my detailed knowledge of the drinks industry is partly fuelled by guilt driven study of alcohol and its abuse which developed during a drink-drive rehab course that the local magistrates tempted me to attend with the promise of a reduction in the duration of my driving ban. For a while I was, thereafter, involved in a lot of alcohol education work and became an expert on the effects
of alcohol, pathology and worked with a couple of national agencies producing campaign posters and educational materials. I even had sensible dialogues with government ministers, Euro M.Ps and the like, challenging our lax drink driving laws and drink unit labelling issues. All that effort convinced me of the sinister vested interest and ultimate power of the drinks' industry lobby, as heinous as is the U.S, pro-gun lobby and tobacco magnets, between you and me. Money talks real time, big time, writers just scribble.

(I can confirm, by the way, dear readers, that, as one inclined to wonder off the point, and ergo, a master of the non-sequitur, and a bit of a linguist, Mary and Joseph were not, in fact, turned away by various inn keepers with no vacancies! Essentially, something was lost by the translators from the original Greek; For Inn, we should have read upper room. Bethlehem-native-Palestinians BC/early AD, lived, spilt level, (real estate fans), with the animals housed in the lower section of the house. The happy couple probably found the relatives were overcrowded upstairs (because of the Roman mandate for them all to go to original home base). Hence, Jesus and his parents got the straw end of the deal and a lot of very young children, doing nativity plays worldwide, annually, are labouring under a misapprehension, when they give the no room at the Inn spiel.

johncoxon 4:06 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
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