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Consumer Journalism, Gonzo Style

In the mid-nineties I used to dream of writing for Loaded magazine, with no trace of shame or furtive embarrassment. Sure, one month they’d have perky Jo Guest on the cover, or Liz Hurley in her underbashers, but that would be interspersed with Richard E Grant, Frank Skinner or Michael Caine. Scantily clad women were just one of the laddish obsessions featured, and whether it was regular features such as ‘greatest living Englishman’ or ‘drop me bacon sandwich’, comic consumer journalism triumphs such as the Crisps World Cup, or in-depth pieces of travel writing such as the time they endured several days at Mardi Gras without sleep or drove a Land Rover through the Amazon basin, there was a Gonzo intelligence and wit at work that lifted it far above the simple tits, vomit and football formula that lads mags have become. They were living the dream, inspired by Hunter S Thompson’s Gonzo journalism, they became part of the stoeis they covered, making laddish behaviour almost heroic. Around 1999 I realised I was embarrassed to be seen reading it in public – and ‘reading’ had become a bit of a euphemism, as the long articles had disappeared – and I stopped buying it.

Until now. Six weeks ago, I lived the dream and spent an afternoon getting pissed with the editor of Loaded.

The occasion was a return to the old days of inspired consumer features: the Credit Crunch Booze Test. With a looming recession, we have to economise, so what are the best budget and supermarket own label beers? The brief was to do a proper, professional tasting job, which I tried my best to deliver. The results are in the August issue, which actually came out at the beginning of July and is due to come off the shelves any day now – I missed it the first time I looked because it’s not listed in the contents section, but you can find it on page 28-29, between an article on pandas and a feature on inflatable pubs. (You can easily spot this issue on the newsagent’s shelf – it’s the one with a naked lady cupping her bare boobs on the front). In fact here it is:

The editor, Martin Daubney, really knew his way around beer and gave me a run for my money in pinning down the various tasting notes – or lack thereof. Buy the mag for the full results – all I’ll say is that if I ever find myself on my uppers with less than 60p to spend on my beer, I’m off to Lidl. They really do pull it out of the bag. Loaded seems to have had a modest revival – it has proper articles, and interviews with actors such as Christian Bale and James MacEvoy. It is still what it is – the literary equivalent of Carling – but next to Zoo and Nuts it’s like the Economist.

After we tasted the beers Martin asked me if I’d mind moving on to vodkas and whiskies, and the afternoon started to unravel. I needed something to wash away the taste of Aldi’s ‘Voska’ (our expert commented “as they say in Withnail and I, even the wankers on the site wouldn’t drink it.’”), and we repaired to Loaded’s local for a very fine pint of London Pride.

Remembering the heady days of Loaded’s youth, I was excited about where things might go from here. It was a Friday, it was late afternoon, and we were already well-oiled. Would the rest of the gang join us after putting the feature to bed? Perhaps they’d invite along some page three girls. Maybe on the spur of the moment we’d charter a helicopter and fly to Amsterdam for last orders. Literally, anything might happen. But I could never have predicted what did. In a sad sign of the times, Martin looked at his watch, said, “Shit,” downed his pint and profusely apologised. He was running late for some market research focus groups about the magazine, which he had to attend that evening.

I’m just glad Hunter S Thompson didn’t live long enough to see such a thing.

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From Oak(well) to Mighty Acorns. Or something.

This is a long post – a magazine article rather than blog entry, but I can’t think of anywhere else to sell it to and don’t really have time, so I’m putting it here instead. No-one’s saying you have to read it all…

Allegedly you can’t trademark a place name as your brand. When I wrote Three Sheets to the Wind, I always wanted to finish my round-the-world journey back in my home town of Barnsley, and compare what I’d seen with good old Barnsley Bitter, once a legendary brew, bought and killed by John Smith’s in the 1960s because, if you believe the locals, it was too good to have as competition.

Such is the scale of the cask ale revival that, when I was planning my Three Sheets trip to Barnsley in early 2005, Barnsley bitter was not only back; there were three different beers claiming to be it. One of them was brewed in Blackpool, which made me doubt its authenticity somewhat. Of the other two, one was brewed in Wombwell, a village on the other side of town (or t’tarn) from where I grew up, and one was in the crumbling old Oakwell Brewery, in the shadow of Barnsley FC’s famous ground, the site of the original Barnsley Brewery. I chose to write about the Oakwell one, because it seemed to have the most authentic lineage. The owners of the brewery were extremely secretive. The passage in the book was fine, but uninspiring. The beer was good. I’ve heard nothing about the Oakwell brewery since.

It’s now looking like I backed the wrong horse.

The Wombwell-brewed Barnsley Bitter came from the Acorn Brewery. What I didn’t know then was that Acorn was very new at the time, and had links with the Blackpool one, which was by then defunct. Since I wrote the book, Acorn has gone from strength to strength, and the first part of my 40th birthday jaunt north was to help them celebrate their own fifth birthday, on 4th July.

Me and Dave, the head brewer at Acorn. A vast majority of brewers in the north are called Dave.
I arrived at the brewery to be greeted by a smell of warm meat and pastry that made my stomach growl. A proper northern buffet had been laid on in the bar, the centrepiece being Percy Turner’s pork pies from Jump.

You may think you know what a pork pie tastes like. Not if you haven’t been to Barnsley, you don’t. Pork pies are to Barnsley what truffles are to the Dordogne. There is no shortage of pork pies in Barnsley, but according to the Acorn lads there had been Soviet-style queues outside Percy Turner’s shop that morning, and this was not uncommon. These were real pork pies, the pastry crumbly, the jelly runny, soaking into the soft, salty, peppery, still-warm meat as it fell apart and melted on your tongue…

Oh yes, we were supposed to be talking about the beers.

The buffet had been laid on because there was a bit of a tasting session happening, and it soon became apparent that I was leading it. I didn’t mind – I do a lot of tasting session now and am good at winging them, but this one was different: the attendees were, in the main, northern publicans. Publicans tend to be an opinionated bunch. They’re not accustomed to sitting quietly while other people speak. And northern publicans – well, I crossed one once. I shan’t be doing it again.

First came Rob from the Gatehouse, Barnsley town centre’s best pub. Rob looks a bit like how Norris out of Coronation Street would look if he was suddenly kidnapped from Weatherfield and dropped in the jungles of 1960s Vietnam, and learned to survive on his instincts and by acquiring the ability to kill with his bare hands. Rob’s pub is one of the busiest on Barnsley match days, and yet he makes no secret of the fact that he’s a Sheffield Wednesday fan. His hard gaze can make you void your bowels involuntarily. And that’s when he’s in a good mood.

But behind Rob came a man who clearly saw himself as the King of the Northern Landlords. He’d even brought an entourage.

Tetley Dave runs the Shoulder of Mutton in Castleford. He worked at Tetley’s for decades before taking over the pub, and fought a ‘Battle of the Alamo’ when the pubco who owned it wanted to shut it down. The Acorn lads had been talking about him coming, and I guessed it was him when his voice boomed from the corridor, insisting that the only beer he’d ever stock permanently was Tetley’s, but that if he was impressed, he may well take a cask of Acorn back with him. He took control of the room as soon as he entered – a tall, man with grey, close-shaved hair and glasses, wearing the trousers and waistcoat of a grey three-piece suit, a white shirt open at the neck. He found a seat that was closest to both me at the front, and Turner’s pork pies down the side. “Nice bit o’ growler, this,” he mumbled between mouthfuls of his third one.

Tetley Dave was accompanied by a man in his late forties with bubble-permed peroxide hair. He drove a RAV-4, the kind of vehicle you normally see covered in the livery of local pop hit radio stations. “He’s a professional entertainer, him,” said Tetley Dave, jerking his thumb at the man who stood grinning inscrutably, leaning against the wall. “He lives wi’ us.” A better writer than me, someone like Jon Ronson (who I was introduced to last weekend and who was, sadly, a bit aloof, perhaps because he took it the wrong way when I described his reading as ‘meandering’), would have been able to get to the story behind this. But I had beers to talk about that I hadn’t yet tasted, and more people were arriving, and the moment passed.

In the brief lulls between orations on the nature of beer, pubs and the universe (well, Yorkshire, and that’s practically the same thing) I managed to run through about five of Acorn’s beers.

Summer Pale was an extremely pale golden ale, white gold, with a floral and sherbet aroma and pear drops washing over the tongue.

Barnsley Gold had a citrus aroma with chewy, gloopy, caramel notes followed by a gentle bitterness.

Then onto Barnsley Bitter itself, a silver medal winner two years ago at GBBF. Combining the drinkability of a true session bitter with a dark richness, a hint of chocolate and red berry fruit, this is the kind of beer that Yorkshire does better than anywhere else.

So Acorn brew good beers. But they’ve been going beyond that. In 2007 they brewed ten different IPAs with different British hops. This year, they’re doing the same thing with American hops: the same basic beer chassis, a 5% IPA, with a different single varietal hop each month. I have to confess I’m a bastard for Cascade hops, I love them, the aromas intoxicate me on their own. So while the Liberty hop IPA was the new one, and Cascade last month’s news, I was guilty of flipping them around. The Liberty IPA was great, full-bodied and rich with the hops not shouting out, but creating a complex brew to savour. But the Cascade… it was a riot, a tropical fruit salad with papaya and citrus fruits. I’d say it had about 90% of the sheer hop hit and bold character of an American IPA, but at 5%, it was distressingly sessionable. The best IPA I’ve tasted since the lads from Stone came over earlier in the year.

This was the point at which I really gained my audience’s attention, and we talked about the legend of IPA, and my journey. One man – who had also arrived with Tetley Dave – took a very keen interest and questioned me on my Indian experience quite closely. I didn’t know who he was then, but Ian Clayton is a well-known broadcaster on ITV and a stalwart of the Yorkshire arts scene. “Oh, I write books as well,” he said at one point during the tasting, when I was talking about my IPA book. I did my best encouraging smile, ignorant twat that I am. Days later, Ian sent me a copy of his latest book. Richard Hawley calls it “beautiful”, Robert Wyatt “a magical roller coaster”, and Record Collector magazine thinks it’s “One of the best books about popular music ever written”. Half way through as I write this, I agree wholeheartedly with all of them. If you only buy one book this year, and you already own both of mine, buy Bringing it all Back Home.

Finally we tasted Old Moor Porter, full of fruit cake and liquorice, laced with vinous notes. I recently did a radio programme for Diageo about stout and oysters and this eternal match was fresh in my mind, so I thought my audience would appreciate the story of how porter was once the drink of the working man, and oysters were the food of poor people, and they just happened to go together in a sublime fashion. Ian nodded thoughtfully, but it was the chance Tetley Dave had been waiting for.

“I had ‘alf a dozen o’ them oysters t’other week.” He paused. “Only two o’ the buggers worked!”

I couldn’t let him get away with that unchallenged. “That’s it!” I said, “That’s who you remind me of. You look just like Jim Bowen!”

Suddenly, Tetley Dave was out of his chair, jabbing his finger at me furiously. “Don’t you mention that name in here! That bloke still owes me five hundred quid!”

As I doubled up with laughter, another no-doubt amazing anecdote slipped by, and escaped. Tetley Dave

Jim Bowen

After that it was time for Rob to leave. He’d enjoyed himself. You could tell this because, although he still looked furious, like he was about to punch someone out, he told us that he’d enjoyed himself.

As he neared the door, Tetley Dave, ever mindful of opportunities for his entourage, called out, “Hey, have you got any entertainment at your pub?”

“We will have if tha’ comes in,” replied Rob, and he was out of the door before Tetley Dave could respond, victory snatched at the close.

The best endorsement for Acorn’s beers is that Tetley Dave took away a cask of one of the IPAs in the back of the RAV4.

That night, the Acorn boys took me out drinking. Allegedly Sheffield has more different cask ales on tap at any given time than anywhere else in the country. We tried as many as we could, and stayed out until we started to fall asleep in our curries. We exceeded the government’s recommended daily intake of units, it’s fair to say. I’m keeping my diary clear for Acorn’s tenth birthday in July 2013.

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Put a little Berghaus in your soul

It was wet and cold in the middle of July, when the rest of the country seems to have had a lovely weekend, but the Latitude Festival, in a gorgeous, leafy park with oak trees centuries-old and a silvery lake, was the perfect end to two weeks of birthday celebrations. I think the sheep, dyed pink, and the punts on the aforementioned lake, were there just for the weekend, but apparently the rest of it is there all the time.

Since turning forty I’m convinced that my knees are going and I’ve started getting heartburn and my back aches, and I really like sitting down much, much more than I used to, but for four days it was splendid to meet friends I don’t see often enough and behave like a bunch of teenage lads. The ailments, if I’m honest, are probably due to too much beer for too long.

Latitude is the perfect destination for anyone who thinks Glastonbury has lost its spirit. Great bands and brilliant comedy were punctuated by strolls to the literature and poetry tents. You could even go and see Sadlers Wells doing a bit of ballet if the mood took you (it didn’t take me).

One of the nicest surprises was at the drinks tent. Alongside Tuborg lager (hey, it’s better than Glasto’s Budweiser) and Aspall’s cider were two ales I’d never heard of before, and both were mighty fine.

It turns out that Hektor’s Brewery is actually on site, in Henham Park, the location of the festival. They supplied two beers: Pure, a clean 3.8% golden ale with a lovely crisp, citrussy hop finish, and Scarecrow, a darker, richer beer at 5%, full-bodied and maltier but still with a delightful hop edge to it that suggests American hops have been involved somewhere along the line, though their website says it’s just full of English hops.

It was with mixed feelings that I took the news that every one of the festival’s five bars had run out of Scarecrow by Saturday afternoon – only half way through the festival. No more lovely 5% beer for me, but you’ve got a love that kind of emphatic endorsement from the youngest festival crowd I’ve ever seen. Up to that point, each time I was at the bar every single order included at least one pint of it, among the ciders and the lagers. I’ve no idea what the product mix was, but ale must have had a higher share than it enjoys in most of the high street pubs in whihc these guys usually drink.

By Sunday it was getting difficult to find Pure as well – they had some left at two of the bars buy Sunday evening. My mates started off drinking cider. After they tried the Pure, they never went back.
A couple of damn fine beers, enjoyed so much more outside, in front of the best bands currently strutting their stuff.

Thanks Latitude – see you next year.

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Beer writer in ‘self-indulgent post’ shocker.

In just over 24 hours I turn 40, and I’ll no longer be able to describe myself as a ‘young writer’ in any respect.

Never mind.

I got two good books out during my thirties, and completed a life-changing sea voyage that will be released as my third book, on the shelves before I hit 41. Maybe that will be the one that allows me to give up the day job and write full time. I doubt it, but hope is what drags a writer back to the keyboard day after day, for eighteen months, or two years, or four, or ten.

I got hit by the brainwave to write Man Walks into a Pub (though it didn’t have the cool title then – my publishers always come up with better titles than me) on 11th September 1998, two months almost to the day after my thirtieth birthday. This means my entire fourth decade – 25% of my life so far – has been devoted single-mindedly to the pursuit of trying to write about beer in a way that can entertain those who are already into it, but more importantly, to put beer in its rightful place in a broader social context, and get those who don’t currently read about beer to appreciate it more.

I guess I’ve had some success. I’ve sold maybe 30,000 books, between the two titles. I’ve got this blog, a few stuttering TV appearances, and some magazine features. Beer has become my life, and has given me a whole cast of new friends who I am so grateful to have met, and who I feel confident I’ll be drinking with for the rest of my days. I’ve been around the world twice, and still get a rush when I’m invited to a bar somewhere to see someone unveil a new brew they’re excited about, and want to try on an audience for the first time.

My first editor once told me they had Booker Prize shortlist authors who would kill for my sales figures. I’m sure that’s true, but mine are nothing to write home about. CAMRA now has 90,000 members. You’ve got to be passionate about beer to join CAMRA, and if every person who cared about beer enough to put their hand in their pocket every year to renew their CAMRA membership also thought my books were worth reading, well, I’d now be living mortgage-free and very happy indeed. For me, there’s nothing better than an afternoon in a beer garden with a pint of TT Landlord in one hand and a good book in the other, but for many, reading and drinking just don’t go together. Maybe I shouldn’t have slagged CAMRA off quite so vehemently in that first book – but someone had to.

No matter.

The last ten years have been a blast. And the thing that both writing and beer exploration have in common is that, as your dreams of being a professional footballer or rock god or fashion model (only one of these three was my dream) fall away as symbols of a youth that you suddenly realise you only ever had one go at, that wasn’t a rehearsal, that had no second chance at – both the craft of writing and the simple enjoyment of beer can only improve as you get older. You read more, you experience more, you know more. If you have your health, you’ve got the rest of your life, unless Alzheimer’s rears its head, to refine your craft, and your enjoyment. I hope I get another forty years doing what I’ve spent the last ten doing. At this age, it’s very comforting to think that, in stuff that’s very important to you, you’re still at the beginning of the journey.

Jesus. This is what Wonder Years would have sounded like if it hadn’t been put out of its misery once Fred Savage hit puberty.

Aaaaaanyywaaay. I get the horrible feeling that in the next few days I will be wishing I had deleted the above rather than posting it.

I’ve spent the last week of my thirties being quite self-indulgent, on a mini-beer-tour around the Great North of England, having a whale of the time. Various posts to follow on my experiences.

More importantly, I’m celebrating the ‘beginning’ of my life, upstairs at the White Horse, on Saturday, 12th July, from 7pm. Any reader of this blog – even the Anonymous Twat(s) who have no knowledge about beer and no meaningful life in the real world – are invited to come along and help me celebrate/drown my sorrows, so long as you play nice on the night. We’ve got some free beer – good beer – and when that runs out, there’s lots more excellent beer that you’ll have to pay for. For fuck’s sake, we’re talking about the White Horse!

If you’ve read this far, you deserve the free stuff.

Please indulge me and cut me a bit of slack – and I hope to see you there on Saturday.

Cheers,

Pete

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American Beers at the White Horse

Looks like I picked the wrong weekend to visit my folks back in Yorkshire…

From Friday 4th (US Independence Day) to Sunday 6th, the celebrated White Horse in Parson’s Green is hosting its first American Beer Festival. We don’t get enough American micros in the UK and this is a great opportunity to try old favourites, some of the growing number of British beers inspired by the American way with the hop, and a few beers that haven’t left the US before now, including a few in cask.

I’m celebrating my 40th birthday there the following Saturday, so if there are any REALLY nice beers, if you could only have one of them and not tell anyone else about them, so there’s plenty left, it would be really appreciated.

They’ve got American bands on and even line dancig at some point, but don;t let that put you off. The full range of beers is as follows:

*Sierra Nevada Torpedo IPA (in cask and keg)
*Sierra Nevada Southern Hemisphere Harvest Ale (in cask)
Sierra Nevada Porter (in cask)
Sierra Nevada IPA (in cask)
*Sierra Nevada ESP (in cask)
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
Sierra Nevada Brown Ale
Sierra Nevada Bigfoot
Sierra Nevada Blonde
Sierra Nevada Summerfest Lager
Flying Dog Gonzo
Flying Dog Doggie Pale Ale
Flying Dog Old Scratch
Anchor Liberty
Anchor Steam

Crouch Vale Amarillo
Durham White Amarillo
Saltaire Cascade Pale Ale
Roosters Yankee
Roosters Outlaw Amarillo
Roosters Cream
Roosters Special
Acorn Sunstorm
Acorn Cascade IPA
Oakleaf Whole Hearted
Archers IPA
Bowman Quiver
Dark Star American Pale Ale
Ascot Posh Pooch
Ascot Alligator Ale
Ascot Wheatsheaf
Thornbridge Jaywick
Thornbridge Jaipur
Thornbridge Ashford
Abbeydale Brimstone
Kelham island Pale Rider
Goose Eye Chinook
Oakham JHB

* Denotes beers that are leaving the US for the first time

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Official: pubs are better than Ant and Dec

It’s true. Pubs are nearly as good as the Queen. But not as good as fish and chips. But then… what about fish and chips IN A PUB? Being eaten BY the Queen? How good would THAT be?
What am I talking about?

A Cornish Pasty, yesterday. Better than real ale. Not as good as pubs.

A new survey of 7,000 people conducted by Holiday Inn asked people in the UK what they loved most about Britain. And despite relentless bad publicity, misinformation, the smoking ban, soaring beer duty and cheaper-than-water beer in supermarkets, “old-fashioned British pubs” came in at NUMBER THREE, behind Her Maj in second place, and fish and chips in pole position. This means that the great British pub is officially cooler than:

  • The Beatles
  • Manchester United (yeah, I know – we hardly needed telling that)
  • James Bond
  • Steven Fry
  • Er… the NHS

So why is the pub struggling so much? Well, there’s a clue in the way this story was reported in The Express, which refers to the pub as a “nostalgic symbol of a bygone Britain”. Pubs are fine when seen in the same light as red telephone boxes and cream teas, it’s just the modern pub we don’t like.Except we do.Fashions in the on-trade are cyclical, and the very best pubs today are redicovering the joys of the traditional English pub – its decor, its menu, its range of cask ales – and presenting them in a way that’s appealing and contemporary rather than retro. This survey is proof that people respond to that. Incidentally, real ale made the list at number 40. Not as cool as Routemaster buses, Glastonbury or Cornish pasties. But way more loved than Pimms, David Bowie, the E-type Jag, Prince Harry, and – oh, sweet joy – the bride of Satan herself, Margaret Thatcher. Erm, Morris Dancers just sneak in at number 50.

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I promise this is the last post banging on about binge drinking hysteria for a while – but it’s a good one

A new pressure group has appeared which, finally, is seeking to establish an opposing voice in what has until now been a largely one-sided debate over the moral panic around binge drinking.

The Responsible Drinkers Alliance (RDA) – has been estabished to represent the ‘moderate drinker’ and combat the way in which ‘concern over the minority who misuse alcohol often results in limiting the freedoms of the majority.’ It aims to give ‘responsible consumers’ a say in tackling alcohol-related harm.

Fantastic news – one very tiny grumble.

The campaign’s main backer is the Wine and Spirit Trade Association (WSTA). So where the hell is beer’s voice in this? Is the beer industry so punch-drunk it can simply no longer defend itself? We’ve got the BBPA, and they do issue moans of protest every time beer and pubs get kicked in the balls, but they seem to spend more time talking the industry into decline than doing something constructive like this.

We all need to get behind a scheme like this and make sure beer is there on the front line.

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24 hour drinking: the truth

Who’s calling me a twat?
To Camden last night, to see My Bloody Valentine.
“Hey Pete, was it a good gig?”

PARDON?

“I said was it a good gig?”

CAN’T HEAR WHAT YOU’RE SAYING! IT WAS A REALLY GOOD GIG BUT THE TWENTY MINUTE FULL-ON DRONE IN THE FINALE, YOU MADE ME REALISE, WAS SO FULL-ON CONFRONTATIONALLY LOUD IT MADE MY TROUSERS SHAKE, I FEARED A NOSEBLEED, PEOPLE WERE RUNNING FOR THE EXIT HOLDING THEIR EARS, AND THE WHOLE THING HAS LEFT ME A BIT MUTTON!

(If you’re feeling like you want to challenge your perceptions of reality, turn the sound on your computer up to FULL and imagine this lasting twenty minutes. This one is not as well shot, but gives a better sense of the PANIC and RAPTURE evoked by the full piece).

Anyway, with our ears ringing, Chris and I, via sign language, decided to go for a swift pint. It was 11.05pm in Camden, one of the most happening, cool parts of Swinging London – sorry, that should have read Swinging London – a city that prides itself on giving New York a run for its money as a fun-filled carnival that never sleeps.

The first six pubs we passed were closed.

Obviously, no restaurants were open. It was a Tuesday night for God’s sake! People have to WORK tomorrow! Were we MAD?

Eventually we came to Camden Lock, and The Ice Wharf, a Lloyd’s No.1 (Posh Wetherspoons) pub. Stencilled on every window (there are a lot of windows) were the words OPEN TILL MIDNIGHT. Hey, we thought, we’re in luck.

On the door of an almost empty pub on a Tuesday night were two black-clad bouncers. They stopped us as we tried to go in.

“Sorry, you’re too late,” I lipread one of them saying.

“You’re open till midnight,” I replied.

“No we’re not.”

“Yes, you are, it says on all the windows, very clearly, open till midnight.”

“Yes, but only for people who are already in here.”

“It doesn’t say that, it says open till midnight.”

“Well, it’s very late now.”

It was 11.18pm.

“I know what time it is. We want one pint and then we want to go home.”

“Well, you won’t have enough time to finish your drinks.”

“Yes we will! Forty minutes for one pint is plenty of time!”

We were sober and reasonable. he really didn;t want to let us in, but eventually he relented. If I wasn’t cool enough to get into a Wetherspoons pub then things were clearly looking grim. But I soon realised it was the bouncers, rather than us, who were the fucking twats of the piece.

We got our tasty pints of ale and sat down. At a table near us were four studenty looking lads. OK, they were sharing a big pitcher of WKD, but that’s a crime against taste, not a crime against humanity, and anyway, the pub had just served it to them. One lad went to the toilet, and while he was away his mate slid down along the banquette seat they were occupying, till he was half-sitting, half lying back. He wasn’t collapsed. His eyes were open. He was carrying on a quiet, lucid conversation with his friends. His feet were not on the seat.

When his friend came back, the recumbent lad sat upright again to allow him to sit down. But the bouncer wasn’t far behind. As Toilet Boy sat down, the bouncer told them both to leave. Toilet Boy had “spent too long” in the toilet, and his mate had “been lying down”. Against the fact that the lads were not slurring, swearing, or behaving anti-socially in any way whatsoever, these crimes apparently constituted behaviour not befitting a Wetherspoon’s pub. The boys were indignant, but not violent, threatening or abusive. They protested, and asked to see the manager. Eventually a boy of about fifteen appeared and claimed that he was the manager. When the lads put their case to him, he refused to listen. His words were “I’m in charge on that side of the bar, he [the bouncer] is on charge on this side. It’s nothing to do with me.”

Thinsg were clearly about to get nasty, and we moved to the other side of the large, empty, quiet pub, and took a seat next to a young couple. As soon as the bouncer and his mate had finished ejecting the four lads, he came over and threatened the man in the couple with eviction unless he removed his baseball cap. Maybe there’s a rule about headgear in Wetherspoons pubs – is it so we can all be surveilled properly as we drink? – but to anyone with even half a brain, this bloke sitting with his girlfriend was about as threatening as Kayo Odejayi in front of goal.

I posted on here recently about how you had to give JD Wetherspoon their due. For all their faults, they really do care about cask ale. But here were Wetherspoons bouncers going out of their way to create an atmosphere of tension and incipient violence, spoiling the night of every single person in the pub, not just those they roamed around picking on. And here was a bar manager in charge of a large Wetherspoons pub saying he had no responsibility whatsoever for the well-being or satisfaction of his customers, admitting that this bouncer, who was clearly out of control, was a law unto himself.

If anyone from Wetherspoons reads this blog – sort yourselves out. Get a sense of perspective. Employ people who are going to stop fights rather than start them, and bar managers with a sense of responsibility to their paying customers. Even better – in situations when bouncers are obviously not necessary, don’t have them at all. The boredom turn these small-minded, vicious pricks into the very aggressors they’re supposed to be keeping out.

If anyone else is near a Wetherspoons and fancies one quiet, late night drink – I urge you to find somewhere else instead.

We did eventually get another pint at a pub down the road. They allowed us in and served us without comment. They allowed us to drink in the beer garden till 12.30 . When the beer garden closed, they asked us politely to move inside, where we could carry on drinking if we wished. But like most people, we checked the time, and left quietly. There were no bouncers, and there was no anger, aggression, or trouble.

Go figure.

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The anti-drink consipracy, Part xxviii

An illuminating piece in the current edition of Private Eye regarding the binge drinking epidemic:

“A vow to curb teenage drinkers was esposed as a sham yesterday with figures showing kids go unpunished,” declared the Mirror last Saturday. “In the past three years, only 34 children have been prosecuted for buying booze. And just seven landlords got the top £1,000 fine for selling booze to underage drinkers”.

Curiously, the paper overlooked another glaring exanple of the law going easy on an adult who supplied booze to children. Just one day previously, a 29-year-old journalist from the South West News Service agency had accepted a caution from Avon and Somerset Police for giving cider and alcopops to a group of 16-year-olds in Bristol, so they could pose for a series of photographs intended to illustrate an article on under-age drinking for… The Mirror!

Tha hapless hack told the youngsters they were welcome to keep the booze when the shoot was finished – and several went on to be involved later that night in what police describe as “a serious disorder incident” which resulted in a teenager being left in a coma for several weeks.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who has watched one of those ‘Binge Britain’ programmes, where the presence of the camera crew distorts usual behaviour. My favourite clip is the one with a bunch of girls walking down the street, chatting and laughing, until they see the camera and run towards it pulling up their tops to show their tits. This clip was used on all the trailers for the programme to show how bad things were. No-one seems to have watched the clip carefully enough to realise that if the camera hadn’t been there, they wouldn’t have done it…

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