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.