A friend of mine went for a walk in the Cotswolds last weekend with his wife. At around four o’clock, tired but happy, they fetched up at a country pub. ‘You’ll have to eat a substantial meal,’ said the landlady, crossly. ‘But it’s four o’clock,’ said my friend. ‘We’re not hungry.’ The landlady tutted and showed him a long and expensive menu. My friend and his wife turned around and walked out of the pub.
This, I think we can safely say, represents one end of the Tier 2 pub spectrum. At the other is a pub I know which used to be up the road from the local police station. This pub had, and continues to have, a famously good relationship with the rozzers: late-night lock-ins have long been a speciality. This pub is open but does not appear to be serving any food at all. If you peer in through the window, the front room is deserted, intentionally, while the back room is heaving with boozehounds, some of them former officers.
As a dedicated pub-goer of long standing, I have spent much of the past week sitting in and, very reluctantly, outside pubs taking the temperature of this ancient but ailing British tradition. The problem is that this government, whose back-of-fag-packet regulations have made our lives such a misery this year, has specified that we can go into pubs in Tier 2 only if we order a ‘substantial’ meal as well as the sundry pints of wallop we were intending to consume.
This seems to me a distinctly middle-class and middle-aged view of why people go to pubs. The young, who seek only oblivion; the solitary, who want only to sit in the corner with their pint; the poor, who cannot afford a £13.50
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