Really, girls?

What made me laugh about this review of the Moon Under Water, was just thinking, ‘he’s talking about Jade, Naomi, Michelle and their lot.’

go elsewhere its horrible. i don't go in there in principle because of the meatheads who drink there and then rampage down the local roads smashing cars up, pissing in people's driveways and making loads of noise. The management of Wetherspoons refuse to do anything about it, I feel sorry for the pub manager himself who is a decent bloke. If the police waited outside the pub from 10pm every Friday night and searched everyone going in, and then nicking them as they came out for breach of the peace you would solve the problem overnight. But they never will...

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mally_drinker - 29 Mar 2011 12:08

Now smashing cars might be classed as youthful boisterousness, but come on girls, pissing in people’s driveways? Really?

Colin

Monday night in Taps is now quiz night. Which isn’t to say that there’s a quiz which anyone is free to enter which you might reasonably expect; but that Irena has somehow managed to get hold of a pub quiz book, and now every Monday night we sit at the bar and, as a team (Ray, Colin, Adam and myself), answer the questions.

And while it’s great fun, we do take it quite seriously, and every round dredge our drink addled brains to try and beat our previous best score for a section – which stands at a creditable 53 out of 60.

This, as you might guess, is another one of those lovely random things which I love about the Taps.

And as you might (or might not) expect, we’re not a bad team. Ray’s a very knowledgeable chap, Adam can hold his own, and when it (laugh though you may) comes to it, I know a thing or two about a thing or two.

But Colin…Colin is smart. Colin is uncommon smart. In fact Colin is unholy smart. The things that bloke knows will literally make you laugh out loud.

History, literature, languages, science, obscure pointless implausible trivia.

This guy knows it.

If ever we do a real pub quiz that’s the first guy on the Taps team sheet.

Not Your Usual Friday Night

Again, many apologies for the lack of posting.

As many of you know I’ve recently started a new job and I thought it best to lay off the internet usage in the first few days until I find my feet.

I’ve mentioned it before, but when you spend as much time in the pub (either as staff or customers) as many of us do, it’s rare that anything truly different or new happens, but on Friday we did get something slightly different, because on Friday there was quite a large group of deaf people in the pub.

[And so what you might say. In fact that’s exactly what you should be saying. So what if there were some deaf lads in the pub. Is that supposed to be unusual or weird or shocking in and of itself?

Well of course bloody not. I should hope that you know me better than that]

What I found interesting is what it told me about myself and my own prejudices.

Because, patronising and condescending though I know it is, I think that I’ve always had this view of disabled people as just being stoic and brave and determined, and well…just thoroughly decent and good, cheerfully facing adversity and overcoming challenges which would humble the rest of us, which I suppose is just another way of saying that I see them as being defined entirely by their disability, rather than as people and individuals first and foremost.

And until Friday it just hadn’t really occurred to me that you could get bad deaf people (yes I absolutely realise how stupid that makes me sound), just as you can get every single sort of every other type of person on the planet.

And that makes me an idiot. Well it doesn’t make me an idiot, it just shows you what an idiot I always am. Just because you’re positively stereotyping it doesn’t make it any less blinkered or prejudiced.

But anyway, these guys were just bad. Pure down low wrong ‘uns from start to finish, and if they hadn’t been deaf I would have called it within five minutes, but because they were, it took me hours to eventually do so.

Prejudice is defined as any preconceived notion or opinion, usually unfavourable, but not necessarily restricted to that, regarding any particular minority group.

It’s the same patronising prejudice which effects a lot of people on the political and social liberal left – which is where I would place myself. The same reverse discrimination that sees the world viewed through the prism of the ‘noble and spiritual savage of the third world’ and the ‘morally bankrupt imperialist of the western world.’

It’s identity politics.

This idea that no matter what atrocities an, for example, Afghan might commit, they shouldn’t – even if this is only an unconscious thought – be held to the same standards of culpability, as, for example, an American soldier. Rather than judging people individually purely on their merits as people.

And that, my friends, is the Taps. A place where your entire view of yourself as a human being can be changed in the span of one Friday evening after work drink.

Someone Is Getting Fired.

That There Interwebs

The future is now.

I mean when you were a kid didn’t 2011 seem like the future? I mean real Back to the Future II, flying cars, Hover Boards, and people living on the moon future.

And while, in general, all of that cool stuff has completely failed to manifest, what has even exceeded our childhood expectations is mobile phone technology.   

I mean that right there is proper future shit. That, my friends, is what we’re talking about.

Just fifteen years ago, the idea that you’d be able to see who you were speaking to on your phone or be able to wirelessly connect to the internet wherever you happened to be was just science fiction stuff.

To be able to instantly download music, get Global Positioning Satellite data direct to your phone, send e-mails, exchange pictures, write on your blog, and become overly obsessed with something called Facebook (and all manner of the other stuff that your fancy phones do), all while sitting on the W8, is just, well….it’s science fiction writ real.

Now, I’ve no doubt that there are innumerable intelligent and insightful theses knocking around investigating the sociological and anthropological impact that the internet has had on society, but since I’m a strange bloke fixated with the Taps Irish Bar, I’m mainly concerned with the impact that internet phones have had on pub conversation.

About six years ago my Dragon’s Den idea (everyone has one) was that pubs should install water and smash proof touch screens with internet capability into the surface of their bartops. Customers could then pay to use them to settle those points of fact and detail that invariable come up (and cause all manner of frustration and contention) during those traditional pub debates which had been taking place in English pubs for hundreds of years.

Who scored the winner in the 1979 cup final?

When was Gibraltar conquered by the British?

Exactly how far are the Falkland Islands from Argentina and Britain, respectively?

Exactly what did the final episode of Quantum Leap mean?

How many men died, as opposed to how many casualties, were there on the first day of the Battle of the Somme?

[These are all genuine examples, two of which almost led to me coming to blows with people]

But now everyone has these type of answers only a few seconds away.

There are now a generation of young pub goers who will never have experienced the frustration and enjoyment of those types of conversations/arguments – and that being the case it has fundamentally altered one of the key cornerstones of the pub experience.  

Last Friday I was in the pub listening to Derek, Alice, Rebecca and Sean trying to list all of the apostles (this arose from a conversation they were having regarding, I think, the origins of  Saints’ Days[1]), but by the time the debate, which could have gone on all evening, had even got going Matt had already looked up the answer on his phone. 

Of course there’s certainly something to be said for the fact that such access to mainly (I’m looking at you Wikipedia) accurate information means that conversations can now be based on fact and certainty, but that would be to ignore the fact that pub conversations, for centuries, have traditionally been based on total bollocks.

Absolutely, being able to access actual data describing North Africa’s up to date latest combined GDP, when discussing the merits of ‘Dropping the Debt’ is useful and informative – [and I’ve got no problem with that at all. Hell I think it’s great that the substantive quality of pub conversations has improved exponentially] – but it does make for a very different pub world from the one which we knew only a few years ago. It’s not necessarily better or worse, it’s just, like most things in life, a bit of both.

---

[1] Derek: ‘St Mungo, now there was a saint.’

St Patrick's Day

It’s an entirely counter intuitive truism I know, but real drinkers don’t like St Patrick’s Day, because it interferes with their drinking.

Now obviously this doesn’t apply if you are actually Irish, but for everyone else St Patrick’s day is just amateur hour (in much the same way as Christmas and New Year’s Eve). It’s a day when every random once a month drinker goes out at the same time and combine [like drunken mighty morphin power rangers] to just make the pub generally intolerable.

[If you are actually Irish of course go crazy; it’s your day and I salute you]

A Perfect Storm

I made a rather uncharacteristic mistake on Friday.

Generally on a Friday I’ll go home at around 11:30 so as to ensure that I’m not too hung-over for my all dayer on Saturday. Now as you might imagine, for me, this requires iron discipline.

Unfortunately I don’t have iron discipline.

So what it requires is a Jade or Gareth (preferable both, one after the other, ten minutes apart) to tell me to go home.

Unfortunately Gareth was off playing an apparently awesome show in Brick Lane and Jade went home early because it was so quiet.

Equally, for some reason I had it in my head that the Taps shut at 12:30 on a Friday night (this was partly due to it being so quiet – I mean I’ve been drinking in the Taps since it opened and in all that time I’ve never seen a Friday or Saturday night like it. In fact I’ve seen busier Tuesday nights). So when the bell for last orders went I thought it was 12:30 because it was so empty.

I only realised my mistake when I got home and it was 2:30.

In other words people, we had a perfect storm, a once in a thousand lifetimes calamitous situation event arising from the powerful combined effect of a unique set of circumstances which led to me still being there when the shutters came down.

Anyway, that mistake aside, I was thinking about where all those people had gone, because it was really very strange.

In general you can predict what the crowd will be like. For instance, the Friday before a Bank Holiday Monday will always be busy. Or the Friday of pay week (and by the same token you can predict that the weekend before pay week will generally be quiet).

But last night there was no rhyme or reason to it. Everyone had just disappeared. It was like one of those wild life programmes where Richard Attenborough whispers quietly: something had spooked the herd away from the watering hole. Some scent of an unknown predator or the ozone whiff of an impending lightning storm perhaps.

But there must have been some manner of explanation for where they’d all gone. Some kind of group logic. Perhaps some kind of big event for random scummers was going on in Palmers Green or something.

A convention of some sort to discuss the latest new developments in taking people's bar stools and dropping glasses on the floor.

Sorry - again

Hey guys, sorry about the distinct lack of posting today, but I’ve been flat out from the second I got in this morning, and now all I want to do is go home.

Well by home I mean the pub. And by the pub I mean…well you know very well what I mean.

Somebody buy me a drink, I’ve earned it today.

Seriously, I would like a pint, a crossword and a bar stool waiting for me in approximately one and a half hours.

Oh, and many friendly welcoming smiles.

Beauty Is Truth

The Romans had a term for it, in vino veritas, "in wine [there is] truth", which, to a certain extent, I agree with.

Though only to an extent.

I know that it’s an aphorism which some people put quite a lot of credence in, but I really don’t.

(To whit, don’t trust anything I say when I’m drunk. Not a single word. It’s invariable untrue and profoundly pointless. This goes doubly for any bets, 10 pence or otherwise, I might make. Stop taking advantage of me).

For instance, my cousin Linley reckons that when people are drunk they are their honest truthful authentic selves, just ‘with the volume turned up.’

And there might be something to that, in that all of us, to greater and lesser extents maintain certain facades which we rarely, if ever let drop. However, those facades, no matter how practiced and expert we are in maintaining them, become more and more difficult to keep up when we’re drunk.

And when those barriers fall it might be that what we’re left with is authenticity. Which is to say truth and the lack of mitigation and mediation in and of that truth.

I can see how that would be a reasonable hypothesis, and it does make some sense  – but what it doesn’t take account of is the fact that without our barriers and facades what’s left underneath is a jumbled incoherent mish mash of any number of unaligned, undefined, unmediated, uncogitated (if it’s a word), illogical neurosis’, emotions, character traits and fears.

That’s not authenticity. That’s chaos. Authenticity is considered. It’s built carefully over the course of a lifetime through the thousands of things we do and think everyday. In other words then, authenticity lies in being the person you want and try to be. Not necessarily the person you are in nature or in essence.

I suppose the question revolves around what you consider truth to be.

Anyway, that’s just something I was thinking about. Jump in with your thoughts.

Spurs

I’ve written before about watching Spurs in big games in the pub when Jude’s there. But she really does make me laugh.

Obviously last night was absolutely huge so emotions were running quite high, although it was far less busy than I expected it to be for such a big game.

In fact there was just a nice regulars crowd in watching it, Daryl and Jude, two of their friends, Adam and his cousin Chris (who himself was going pretty mental for most of the game), myself, Gareth, Lucy (from the Kings Head) and her dad, Casey watching from behind the bar and some random people down the end.

But it was really nice for all that - or indeed, because of that.

What made me laugh though was Jude’s constant verbal obsession with the size of Ibrahimovic’s nose.

At one point this image of Ibrahimovic got a close up.

And Jude mutters dismissively to herself, “what’s he praying for, a smaller nose?”

And the whole pub just cracked up for about five minutes.

Obit

I think that  this is a really rather beautifully written piece about the death of the traditional English pub.

This is particularly wonderful:

“Drama suits pubs. They are places for pushing limits, and not just in the sense of jars and fists. A pub is where Prince Hal first tested his mettle for Crécy and Agincourt, and where the knee-high David Copperfield, on the run, confidently ordered a glass of “the Genuine Stunning”. Pubs are where the first workers’ associations met to demand higher wages, and where (at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand) proper electoral reform was first floated. “The Communist Manifesto” was jotted down, locals claim, at the Flask in Highgate, where Karl Marx was a regular. Pepys went to pubs to sing, as much as to drink. In pubs normal wariness is suspended in favour of live and let live, of free speech and free space. The words “Free House” carry on the theme, somehow, in ways a corporatised pub and a constrained landlord cannot. Americans have their guns; but the Briton has always had pubs, liberty glowing in thousands of small corners, as his weapon to beat back tyranny. John Bull lives there. When pubs are swallowed up, or die, something very much more than a beer-shop perishes with them.”

(I wish I could write like that).

I know it’s long, but really, it’s well worth the read. Go on, for me.

 

John the Revelator

I am, you see, a naturally garrulous chap.

(For garrulous, you may of course prefer to substitute tedious and/or dry)

Or at least under my own terms, that is. I like nothing more than to sit at the bar and have a chat over the course of a long Saturday afternoon, unless of course the person I’m talking to is someone that I really don’t want to talk to. In which case there’s nothing I hate more than having a chat over a long Saturday afternoon.

But on Saturday (in a moment of drunken reverie) I realised that it’s likely that more often than not I’m probably the person that other people get a bit fed up talking to[1]. But do so anyway because 1. I’m there, and 2. I’m quite a nice person and they don’t want to offend me.

And I feel bad about it. Or at least I do now that I think about it.

But I suppose I can take some comfort that feeling guilt at least means I’m not a psychopath.

(Hey, it’s better than nothing)

Of course this drunken epiphany occurred to me at 11pm, and anything I think at 11pm on a Saturday night is either wrong, preposterous, illegal, preposterously illegal, steeped in dark and bloody thoughts of primal vengeance, or just plain, flat out dumb.

---

[1] Which isn’t to say they think I’m a horrible person or anything. Just that I’m a bit drunk, repetitive and boring.

Self Inflicted

I’ve gone and shot myself in the foot here haven’t I. Metaphorically speaking that is. I mean I really have gone and done it now.

As you know, I’ve taken the last couple of Friday’s off in a row now, which means that I’ve been able to fully throw myself into Thursday drinking safe in the knowledge that I won’t have to get up to go to work on the Friday morning.

And it’s been great.

As I’ve always said, as long as the scum are absent, Thursday is always the best day of the week, and knowing that the most strenuous thing I have to do the next day is waking up at 12pm and popping out to Waterstones and for something to eat, makes it all the better.

The problem is though (the metaphorical shooting in my metaphorical foot) is that now I’ve gone and spoiled Thursdays for myself.

I can’t get this Friday off for work reasons, and I find myself now thinking, ‘well, what’s the point of going out on Thursday if I can’t properly enjoy it? I might as well just go home.’

(Or the Kings Head).

I’ve gone and ruined what was the best night of the week for myself.

And the worst thing is that I did it to myself. It’s entirely self-inflicted, for before then, how could I miss that which I’d never known.

Why couldn’t I just be happy with what I had? Why did I have to try and make my life just a little more enjoyable?

Oh false economy. Oh Duplicitous outcome.

Why did I twist when I should have stuck?

Taps Conversations #2

Oh those Taps conversations; those erudite exercised late evening Taps contemplations of the soul and the human condition.

Last night Sean and Tom spent a quite inordinate amount of time discussing whether they’d rather be called a cunt or a wanker. Eventually, after a great deal of tightly focused and highly concentrated thought and debate, reaching the conclusion that they’d rather be called a cunt, because you can, apparently, respect a cunt while you can’t respect a wanker.

However, it was also established (in an addendum to the original discussion) that being called a wanker was better than being called a twat (but worse than being called an arsehole).

And so now you know.

The next time someone calls you a cunt you can reply, ‘well at least I’m not a wanker.’

(In this regard the Taps is like Sesame Street for grown ups. A place where you can learn all sorts of useful socialisation lessons).

Under Pressure

Have you missed me?

(Oh, don’t lie, of course you haven’t)

Anyway guys, many apologies for the lapse in posting these last few days which has been partly been due to being on leave, but also because of lots of pressures at work.

Hopefully, normal service will (all being well) resume tomorrow.

I promise that I won’t abandon you again.

(Well, unless I can get this Friday off as leave again anyway. In which case you lot are all dumped).