Blink And You'll Miss It

I hate standing up in the pub. I absolutely can’t stand it (if you’ll forgive the pun). Basically, if there’s nowhere to sit I’m leaving. I mean the very idea of standing up for hours on end is ridiculous. We’re not animals. We’ve travelled far enough down mankind’s evolutionary pathway to have invented chairs to sit on haven’t we? And that being the case why would you stand up? It’s a crazy act of lunatic defiance that I’ll have no truck with.

None.

I also hate sitting at tables. When you’re in a pub you should sit at the bar. That’s the rule. Sitting at a table is just wrong. There’s just something horribly claustrophobic about sitting at a table with a group of people. Even if you nominally like those people. Which I almost certainly won’t.

You’re just stuck there. Trapped in a round [I also hate rounds. I want to drink at the pace I want to drink at. I don’t want to have to hurry my pint because everyone else is drinking quickly anymore than I want to have to linger over the last dregs of one for ages just because everyone else is drinking slowly. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that rounds are a bad things – they obviously make sense for the bar staff, but I just prefer not to be involved] and at the mercy of whatever conversation is being held.

But at the bar you can jump in and out of conversations as you like and nobody will care. You can read the paper or do the crossword for a bit if you want. You can stare into space and zone out. At the bar you are free.

If you did that at a table people would think you were mental.

Equally, the bar is where all the action is in a pub. It’s where the regulars sit and the staff are. If you’re not at the bar you’re really not involved.

If I go to a random pub by myself (something which I haven’t done for years actually – unless you count the Kings Head – which you really can’t [the last time I was in the Kings Head Charlotte and Sarah were working and Manchester Simon, my brother and Lee were in there drinking]) I’ll always sit at the bar. It’s just more interesting. You get to listen in on the conversations and watch the interactions. If you harbour ambitions of becoming a regular in that pub the bar is where you need to sit. It’s where you learn people’s names and the regulars getting chatting to you.

Thinking about it, the process of becoming a regular is a peculiar one (and something which I intend to think about in more detail). For staff it’s really quite easy. They work in the pub for a while and then if they also choose to drink in Taps they’re just de facto regulars from the state, e.g. recently, Charlie (or is that wrong? Is he actually a regular at all? Thoughts, please). But for everyone else the process is more indistinct. For instance I don’t actually remember how Daryl became a regular (I know that in many ways he could be considered to be a regular more than everyone else in that he was a regular when the place was Browns). But I absolutely don’t remember how or when it happened, although to be fair it was several years ago now.

But that said, I do remember when and how Graeme, Ray and Colin became regulars.

Isn’t that strange?

I remember when Adam used to come in with Gary and the rest of that lot, but I don’t remember when and how he became a regular in his own right.

This needs to be studied in more detail. Hopefully I can count on you all to help.