The Future Is Here

I was talking to Charlie last night about the pub, and I was really quite surprised by how much he actually likes Taps.

I mean, he is after all a young chap with lots of unruly hair and chequered lumberjack shirts, who, you’d think, would find the place at best dull, and at worse....well just faintly laughable.

But he doesn’t. He likes the place. And to me it was quite heartening to think that young people can still appreciate a decent local, and so that being the case, where they existed, there would still be a place and a future for pubs as central parts of local communities.

As I say, we were talking, and he reminded me of a Saturday afternoon not long ago when he came in to watch the rugby with a couple of his friends, and they’d been able to get a pizza delivered to the pub and eaten it at the bar.

Apparently his friends had thought it brilliant that they could do that, and Charlie still remembered it quite fondly.

And I thought to myself that although that’s only a small part of what it’s like to be a regular in a good pub, it was something which people were growing up with increasingly rarely these days given the rate that small pubs were closing and large standing up drinking markets like Wetherspoons and Yates, opening (because those really aren’t pubs; they’re something else entirely different).

I mean, when you think about it, the fact is that, staff apart, the youngest regular in the pub is probably Adam. And he’s not exactly a spring chicken.

But what I’m getting at is that the reason younger people don’t become regulars is that they don’t necessarily know what the benefits are of a nice local pub is. It’s a circular argument, I suppose. Because to enjoy a local pub you really need to be a regular, but if you don’t know what the benefits of a local pub are (opposed, say, to the Moon Under Water), would you even want to be a regular? Hell, why would you even go a locals pub in the first place?