At the start of the first festive shift, the other bartender and I silently pulled our crackers and grimly donned paper hats. Yet it worked a treat and taught me the value of making your own fun
I was an employee and a customer at this pub as a teenager in the early 1990s. This was one of four or five pubs clustered around the high street in the town where I grew up in Somerset. We gravitated towards the Blue Ball as teenagers, not because they served underage drinkers. They didn’t. And we could only afford to drink lime and soda anyway. No, we loved this place because it had (drumroll) two bars. So we were not only cool enough to go down the pub (never “to the pub”, strictly “down the pub” or, better still, “down the Blue”), but we even had our own bar.
Turn to the right and you walked into the bar for saddos and old people (anyone over 20). On the left was our bar: brighter, airier. Although “airier” was relative at this time in history. This was more than 10 years before the indoor smoking ban. So both bars featured a cheerful, unremarkable fug of Superkings (right) and Silk Cut (left).
The two separate areas were rarely breached by the opposing sets of clientele. Although if you had a “serious” conversation to navigate (relationship break-up, friendship drama, episodes of parental opprobrium), it was understood that the proper place for a tête-à-tête was in the “elderly” area. These were conversations which would merit perhaps an entire pint of lime and soda.
