I love pubs. I am, like my dad, a pub person. This is a state of mind, not a measure of alcoholism. I love specific pubs – my local, the ones I always frequent on holiday in Norfolk or visiting my sister in Devon, the one near my friend who is never in when she says she’ll be and so I have to have a place to wait – and I love pubs generally.
I love the peace you find when you go at peaceful times, like mid-afternoon on a weekday, and I love the crescendo of noise and activity that builds every evening and that culminates in Friday and Saturday night chaos. (I don’t go then, obviously. I stick to m’quiet afternoons nursing a bitter lemon, though I do still ramp to a half of shandy or cider as the week wears on. I mean I love the fact that the rhythm of pub life exists so reliably that you can confidently play in and out of it as dictated by your age, relationship status and/or extroversion).
I love that on Saturdays and Sundays beer gardens fill with families and that by Sunday night they have emptied and the bar has become a haven for quiet drinkers once more and the cycle will begin anew.
It is clearly non-pub persons, however, who have proposed new rules to minimise “vertical drinking” – ie standing up to have a drink. You can see the divergence in thinking and approach already. This is not “vertical drinking”. This is “drinking”. It is from this standard that all other booze consumption in a pub deviates. “Shall we sit down?” is the question pubgoers ask each other. Not “Shall we stand up?” Now, most people prefer to sit and do. That is not the point.
