I’d love to claim the Hand & Heart in Nottingham taught me something profound – but it was mostly about bankrolling free rounds
When I was a teenager, before Tripadvisor, pubs lived as mental notes rather than star ratings. There was the one where – exactly like that scene in The Inbetweeners – we realised they’d serve us a pint at 16 if we ordered some food (one shared plate of chips). There was the one you might get lucky in on Christmas Eve; the one you’d take a girl to, to impress her with the romantic views; and the one that only served cider in halves because it was so brain cell-poppingly strong – a pub best tackled before a bank holiday Monday, known colloquially as “Super Cider Sunday”, when you still had a few brain cells to spare.
When I arrived at university, the pub that became my second home was the Hand & Heart. Like Nottingham’s other famous pub, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem (which claims to be the oldest pub in England), it’s carved into the city’s sandstone caves, a setting that means you get to feel like Batman sipping a brandy after a hard day’s crime fighting. It was also our true local, just a quick stagger from the student house six of us shared – which became both an incentive and a deterrent. While our peers would start drinking at 7pm or 8pm, we had a reputation for rolling up for last orders, meaning we could leave the house at 10.20pm, be pint in hand by 10.30pm and – if we necked them fast – get two or maybe three in before the big lights flickered on.
