The War on Fun
Why the Old Man Pub will save us from doom.
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The horror. The horror. The pub landlord looms behind the bar, counting her filthy, ill-gotten lucre. From the £6.40 she forced from my wallet at gunpoint for a pint of Guinness, this latter-day kulak chivvies a larcenous fifteen pence.
Reader, you read correctly. Correct, too, is your sense of my facetiousness. The landlady, whose name I forget, is a diminutive Irish lady who insists with old-world charm: “Go sit down, I’ll bring this over to you.”
This pub, The Britannia in trendy Hoxton, performs a civilised witchcraft. The landlady charges a rural price in a Central London postcode. For her efforts, she keeps a piddling fifteen pence from each pint sold.
There is much chatter over the state of the ailing British institution: the local boozer. Since 2000, some 15,000 pubs have called a permanent last orders. At this rate, we’ll enjoy a mere scattering—perhaps 10,000—across this increasingly dreary land by 2040.
That chatter, well-meaning though it may be, commits the most modern of offences: over-complication. In an age of algorithms and optimisation, we miss the pints for the barrel.
According to the commentariat, British pubs are dying because of ‘changing tastes’—a claim debunked nightly by a brief sojourn to Wetherspoon, the British chain pub so successful it has planted its flag in Alicante, Spain.
If the British pub were truly coughing up blood-speckled phlegm en route to a timely death, why are Wetherspoons packed from morning to night? The answer is simple. Prices.
Saunter onto a Wetherspoon carpet and you are transported back to 2007, when drinks changed hands for south of a fiver. Walk into a typical high street boozer, and you’ll find £7.50 pints justified by beanbags, quizzes, skittle alleys, or some other flummery dreamed up by a Millennial in a brand awareness meeting.
This difference is not trivial; it is psychological. Charge a fiver and I’ll stay until you kick me out, demanding ‘just one more!’ I’ll traipse home, forty quid lighter. But charge £7.50 and even the drunkest of Keynesians snaps his wallet shut.
Such forward-thinking pubs, blinded by the false prophet of progress, suffer for the same reason their political equivalents suffer: ordinary people sense bullshit. Much as those in the lanyard class talk in acronyms and buzzwords conceal their lack of substance, the pub with the skittles alley conceals its obscene prices.
Yet those prices are not the work of some avaricious kulak, lest Labour see all business owners in that light. Of the fiver you hand to the landlord, a hefty portion goes straight to the state. After wages, overheads, and enduring energy costs amongst the highest in Europe, he is left with a princely fifteen pence.
Despite the modern political class’s addiction to motion without movement, some things do not need revamping or reimagining. This is why Wetherspoons thrive. No music. No quizzes. No retro games. No axe-throwing. Just tables, beer, spirits and reliable prices. Young and old alike. Every night of the week.
I would sooner lose an evening in a pub that stopped the clock in 1973 than forfeit a minute in a gastro pub that harangues its captive patrons with youth-club amusements. A bar behind which lopes a grinning Jeffrey Dahmer and upon which sits a suspiciously cloudy cocktail entices me more than a pub quiz—an activity which surely violates some forgotten article of the Geneva Convention under ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’
So too, it turns out, with Generation Z. Among this supposedly abstemious cohort has emerged the niche phenomenon of the ‘Old Man Pub’: a traditional boozer serving reasonably priced drinks to those who wish to buy them. Behind the bar lopes a rotund middle-aged man compulsorily named either Jeff or Dave. His face hangs in healthy incredulity at the steaming imponderabilia drifting in from the outside world.
His eyes train on half-empty glasses. “Another?” is all he says. Your intention to have one or two dissolves into pints three, four, and five—but it scarcely matters. Jeff charges a fiver a throw, even in central London. That’s two-and-a-half pints an hour on minimum wage. Not the gold standard of four, but respectable. No budgetary guilt. Everyone’s a winner.
Our political class could learn a thing or two. Politics, like the local pub, lives or dies on reciprocity and trust. Hence Nigel Farage’s appeal. Whatever one thinks of him, he is reliable. His party has led the last 200 polls for good reason. He does not speak in acronyms or managerial slogans. He talks as if warm blood courses through his veins. Farage is perhaps the only politician who can pose convincingly with a pint in his hand. Why? Farage enjoys a pint. No focus-group photo op necessary.
A poll this week found Brits think we are in a worse state today than back when the global economy melted in 2008.
I suspect Farage’s fun-loving, everyman appeal charms ever greater swathes of a nation quite thoroughly fed up. They’ve had quite enough of the Acronym Ayatollahs and their fatwas on everything fattening, fun, or pleasurable.
Many in the media and London’s cultural circles will never understand this. They lacquer their lives with appearance and appurtenances. They scoff at Farage’s appeal just as they scoff at the notion that a pub need only sell beer at a fair price.
What plagues our pubs plagues our Parliament and almost everything else. The managerial mindset—thinking in Excel, speaking in acronyms—excels at motion without movement. There is always something to optimise, future-proof, or revitalise. Why? Because standing still exposes the standee. Crack open the managerial skull, and you will find kernels of nonsense exploding like popcorn in a hot skillet. You won’t find much else.
One of my beloved pubs, The Lamb in Bloomsbury, has served patrons with grub and grog since time immemorial. The concept riots in simplicity: offer an agreeable room in which people may douse a few hours with their preferred poison or sit alone with their thoughts. The bar is never empty. Once, I jokingly asked whether they had an app. The barmaid scowled at me with studied horror. “I’m kidding! I’m kidding!” She still eyes me with suspicion.
The formula appears to work. Charles Dickens drank there. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set too. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes staged their famous public skirmishes there—the ritual foreplay of doomed lovers.
They say that every pub is a parliament. Pubs, for me, are the original social media. But with one crucial difference: there is no edit button and no filters.
Hence why modern politicians look so patently weird whenever their PR team squeezes them into a boozer for a photo op. Their rictus grin suggests they’re starring in an ISIS video. No wonder. The pub is the last place on earth where they might encounter that most beastly of creatures: the ordinary—and thoroughly pissed off—British citizen.
The scientific term for insensitive and ineffective movement is Brownian motion, usually seen in amoebae. Seems fitting for your average modern politician, Brit or American.
Sad to read this and learn of the demise of the English pub, at least the ones I recall from my wanderings in the Hertfordshire countryside in the 1980's. My first taste of bitters and some memorable evenings being asked to leave, usually after last call but not always. Those were the days.