Low life | 22 October 2011

That famous ideal pub of George Orwell’s, The Moon Under Water? Sounds boring to me. There’s no music, every customer is a ‘regular’ with his own chair and it is always quiet enough to talk. The barmaids call you dear (not ducky as they do in ‘raffish’ pubs). If singing breaks out in the Moon Under Water on Christmas Eve, that singing, George assures us, is always ‘decorous’. He’ll be the lanky one in the public bar, no doubt, buying stamps and sipping stout out of his own china mug.

My ideal pub is the Black Lion in Plaistow, East London. It’s the pub we go to before the match. George Orwell would probably think it looked quite promising from the outside. The Black Lion is an old coaching inn, reputedly a haunt of the highwayman Dick Turpin. Sometimes we drink our beer standing on the cobbles of the old coach yard.