Pub Crawl

An example of a great bar can be found in Chicken, Alaska. Chicken has one petrol pump, one café, one shop and one bar. When we arrive, the bar is packed, and ignoring the ‘No guns and no knives’ sign, I order a round of drinks for my television crew.

Foolishly, I am wearing a pair of multi-coloured socks and 10 minutes later I am suspended upside-down, my boots are taken off and the offending articles are pulled off and stapled to the ceiling as the first trophy of the night. It was my fault for wearing ‘girlie’ socks according to the local gold-miners. After four more hours of drunken researching, pool playing and throwing collapsed bodies out into the night air, our work was done.

The next morning, our producer asked me if I had bought the whole pub a round of drinks. The only thing I could recall was being encouraged to ring a large bell that hung over the bar and, after ringing it, the whole place going wild and stampeding the bar. I mean, maybe that could explain the huge bar tab of nearly $300 for one night?

Oh, but what a great night! Filming the next day was a joy because we now knew everyone in this small town and everyone knew us. And there you have the essence of the local pub, something that is quickly becoming a dying breed.

What’s killing the traditional British pub is the curse of the gastro bar. These nasty, boring, designer wine bars are destroying the old, working-class boozer. You can spot these phony places a mile off because they all look the same: smart and slickly low-lit rooms with exposed brick that is a desperate attempt to recreate a warm, cozy feel. They serve nice organic food (which is just a ploy to slap high prices on all food and drink), but what they’re really good at is excluding the working class.

The point of these bland bars is to make the middle-classes feel comfortable—and by comfortable I mean that they don’t have to mix outside the safety of their own group.

I want to go to a pub where there’s a good chance that everyone and anyone will chat —even complete strangers—and talk drunken crap all night. This is almost non-existent in a gastro bar because the new ‘locals’ remain stuck in their cliques (like kids in the school playground), and if you ever had the cheek to actually start up a bit of banter with them, they look at you with fear and suspicion.

What I love about local bars is the mixture of people, all under one roof, creating a fun and quite unique atmosphere. You have: City slickers in suits, that have wandered in for ‘just one drink’ and will be there all night, pissed as farts; the old boy, and his dog, in the corner who has been coming to this place for 40 years and has untold stories to tell (though after a few jars you can’t understand a word and, worse, you can’t get away); the landlady that rules the roost with an iron fist, but is as friendly as they come, creating a warm and relaxed feeling; the young pool shark whose life revolves around the pool table and who holds the title of the dullest person in the pub; a group of women at the end of the bar laughing together so much that their glasses are shaking..

To while away the time you can count on: the card game every Monday; the general knowledge quiz on Wednesdays (where we all cheat by texting friends for answers to the difficult questions, all so we can win a cheap bottle of wine that is gone within five minutes but is enjoyed nonetheless because we beat the team of school teachers and librarians).

This is a pub that I want to frequent; a pub that is just an extension of normal living, not some stale, lifeless room that feels like an art gallery with drinks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 9:46 pm and is filed under Wright of Way. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.