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.

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[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.