No. 19 The Death of the Great British Boozer

Pubs are closing down at a rate that will terrify men of words and forward thinking, the length and breadth of the nation. The reported figure is just shy of an alarming four a day! Yes!! Four a day!!!

There was a time when a man only had to step outside the front door and he’d find himself in the warm bosom of his local hostelry. A pint of his particular poison in the one hand; a cheroot, a pipe, or whatever his chosen method of tobacco intake was, in the other.

Not anymore. A man can walk for days before even so much as catching the faint whiff of stale beer, sweat and dried blood that is oh so familiar and like an ethereal comfort blanket to him. It is a sobering image that springs to mind when you think of a man losing his home from home, cast adrift from his community anchor and left to wander aimlessly in search of another that will reward the hard work and years of loyalty he’s put into his very own haunt.

What comes as an even harder kick to the knackers is what they do to said pub. Once time has been called on that final emptying-of-the-barrels lock-in and the heavy doors that would’ve stood firm to an assault from William Wallace and his band of loonies, have been bolted shut.

Not content with razing a man’s drinking hole to the ground, they tend to now convert them into something else. It’s almost the final insult. Another two fingers in the direction of the working men looking to indulge in a harmless bit of drunken revelry on their days off.

We’ll take your memories, your good times, every last ounce of fun you had within those four walls, and we’ll gut them, fillet them, and spit the contents back at you, so that all that’s left is the husk to remind you daily of what once was, safe in the knowledge you’ll never have it again. Ha ha.

The main culprits tend to be Chinese or Indian buffet restaurants. Pubs with decades of heritage behind them transformed into characterless food halls, where the grub’s laid on in troughs for everybody with a spare fiver in their pocket to stuff themselves sick on a continuously refilled slurry of high-fat slop and MSG.

Another is low-cost housing, where the pub is converted into flats, usually for a housing association as an ‘on the cheap’ alternative to new housing. I’ve even seen a pub converted into a mosque… Now surely I wasn’t the only one to spot the irony there?

So who’s to blame for this? Blaming others is the national pastime, so it would be wrong for us not to at least look to somebody’s door to lay the rapid demise of the Great British drinking establishment at.

Firstly let us take a look at the two types of pub there are. By this I mean local and backstreet boozers. Not the city-centre meat-markets.

• The Builder’s Pub – The Builder’s pub is sadly being hit the hardest. This is your good, honest boozer. What they’d once have called a spit-and-sawdust establishment, where the liberal sprinkling of sawdust upon the floor meant you were free to spit wherever you liked. The sawdust may have gone but the character remains the same. These are the places you can have a pint, pull a game bird, and get a punch-up if you so wish, and not necessarily in that order. They’re not the sole haunt of builders but grafters everywhere. The demise of the builder’s pub is echoed by the general decimation of the working classes and the obstacles placed in the way of them earning an honest wage.

• The Student Pub – The Student pub is poncy, usually ironic in some form or other, and proud to serve food, tea and coffee. The less said about it, the better.

There is also a sub-category of the Builder’s pub, which is known as the Estate pub.

• The Estate Pub – The Estate pub is either on, or in close proximity to a council estate. It is similar to the Builder’s pub in many respects, the main difference being that its patrons tend not to work. But this is to the benefit of the rest of us, as you can buy almost anything in an Estate pub should you possess the minerals required to step across its threshold. Be it illegal or otherwise, the Estate pub can provide you with what it is you’re after. They are like a slightly more dangerous version of a church hall bazaar.

So with an idea of the Great British boozer in mind, what can we blame for its imminent extinction? Well it’s been a multi-pronged assault on the drinking man.

Kids in pubs
This was originally intended to be titled ‘Kids in Pubs’, for it’s with this particular relaxation in the licensing laws that the rot began to set in.

Whoever had the bright idea of loosing kids into pubs is truly an idiot-savant of the highest order. Minus, of course, the savant.

Jeffman looks fondly back on a time when kids were only allowed in the beer garden. Or in some rare cases what they referred to as the ‘family room’. This would often be equipped with a scabby old pool table to keep the kids occupied whilst the moms and dads got on with the more important business of getting pissed. If there was no ‘family room’ and it was raining outside, then it was tough luck. A gaffer’s gaffer wouldn’t be swayed.

But not anymore. Kids are allowed in pubs with a parent up until 9 ‘o clock. What’s so wrong with leaving the little darlings out on the carpark?

What exactly is their purpose? They’re not spending their hard-earned there. All they do is get under the feet and often in the way of those indulging in the Great British pastime of the pub punch-up. A tradition that has been upheld in this country ever since the first amoeba crawled from the primordial soup and spilt somebody’s pint.

Food in pubs
Pubs are places for like-minded drunks to do what it is they do best. That involves the consumption of alcoholic beverages, putting the world to rights, and extracting the urine from one’s drinking partners. Nowhere is there any call for food in this remit. Scratchings, crisps and nuts are as far down the culinary path as a pub needs to go. If these are not enough to satisfy a committed drinker’s hunger, then there’s always the chippy. That’s what they’re there for.

Smoking ban in pubs
Ever since the government went back on yet another of their promises and imposed a blanket ban on the smoking of anything combustible by the naked flame inside Britain’s pubs, numbers have dwindled, pubs have closed. Coincidence? You decide.

But picture twenty blokes stood outside a pub, huddled around a solitary patio heater on a freezing cold winter’s night, just so they can have a fag. Then imagine they can do this from the comfort of their own home with the final culprit on the list to relieve their boredom.

Cheap supermarket booze
Good for alkies and professional drinkers. Bad for pubs. A supermarket’s sole income doesn’t come from the sale of alcohol, neither are they privy to the margin-reducing overheads that a landlord is. Hence they can afford to offset the crippling duty tax, which is another main factor in the castration of the pub trade.

A serious note to end on. But one that befits such a serious subject. Where will we drink? What will we do with our freetime?

When all the pubs have gone and the lunatics are left wandering the streets, it’ll just be another page in the catalogue of despair we find ourselves leafing through on a daily basis. You have been warned.

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