I miss the pub

How it feels without the pub

The pub is what its name stems from – a public room. It is a place to buy alcohol of course but for so many people it’s a place of connection. It’s a place where, if you live alone, you can go there and meet friends for a convivial chat about the match, or politics, or whatever takes a fancy. If you don’t meet a friend you can still sit at the bar and enjoy the presence of others around you. For so many, it is a refuge from loneliness and something to look forward to at the end of the day.

I don't have loads of friends. If you said "name ten close friends", I'd struggle to complete one hand full. I miss the pub, the changing set of folk who I have a passing chat with, even the occasional full on row. I miss thinking at nine o'clock, "I'll go to the pub for a couple of beers", then picking up a magazine or a paper and heading there. Some days that magazine won't get opened because there's folk to talk to, maybe a joke or two, but other days you'll just spend a quiet hour there.

There's a lot of talk about how we're going to be in a "New Normal", no specifics just hints of new controls and restrictions. The promise of more petty fussbucketry built on the back of a disease that, by the time we're all bashing our heads against the new rules, will be history. Problem is that the nannies, jobsworths and busybodies will be out in force telling us these new rules (often not rules but guidance or advice treated as a rule by these joyless worrywarts) are for our own good. They'll be armed with convenient statistics and an untouchable moral certainty.

I hope that dragging out the reopening of pubs and clubs doesn't result in another bunch of them closing. It'll the ones serving poorer and more isolated communities. The grand ones run by TV celebrity cooks with their huge gardens, playgrounds and all the saloons turned over to dining, these pubs will be fine. The little hobby pubs in the trendy part of the big city will be fine too given they thrive on selling overpriced, overhopped beer to bearded men who drink it in thirds and manage two of these in a visit. No, it'll the remaining street pubs, the place where your working class grandpa played darts, where your dad watched memorable football matches and where today ordinary blokes with overalls and dirty boots arrive early doors for a pint before heading home, where the quiz, karaoke and psychic evening pulls in all sorts later on.

These are the places you go to wet the baby's head, to remember departed friends or family after a funeral, and to celebrate or comiserate after the cricket or football game. We keep being told by MPs and other grand folk that the pub is the "heart of the community", petitions are signed, motions passed and letters written (but not enough beer drunk - which is why they're closing). Yet those community hearts disappear, keep dying. On estate after estate, in village after village, on the edges of towns, on lost high streets the pubs are vanishing, memories captured in a house named "Royal Oak" or the old bloke telling you that curry takeaway was a pub once upon a time.

As yet the government hasn't told us how it's going to reopen the heart of the community, whether there'll be as Head Rambles describes in Ireland, a set of ideas that involve no standing, restricted sitting, half closed loos, no live music and no football. I fear that government, trapped in the shining headlights of this virus, will chose cowardice and condemn pubs to a soulless oblivion and those of us for whom that pub was a big part of our social engagement to a life stood looking out the kitchen window wondering what to do.

I miss the pub. And will miss it more when it's closed for good.

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