Down the Pub

Sitting in the warm glow of my local pub last Friday, chatting with a group of friends about subjects as diverse as music, food, racism and allotments, it struck me that I could not remember the last time I had done this. Usually when I am in a pub – and it is not that often these days - it is for either a meeting or a pub quiz; never without purpose, never just to relax, never only to drink and talk. And I realised that it is a shame, because there really is no better way to spend your leisure time.

One hundred years ago there were 99,000 pubs in Britain; now there is half that number and it is declining at a rate. Nearly 30 pubs close every week in this country and if that were to continue, there would be none left by 2050, That, of course, will not happen but the sharpest decline has been in the past ten years and it has been faster in rural areas than urban.

Home drinking has long been killing pubs but there are a number of other social factors involved in the waning of the local: a change in attitudes towards alcohol has seen less being consumed now than there was a dozen years ago (a fact I find hard to believe), there has been a significant shift in tastes away from beer (a fact my own experience supports) and the UK smoking bans of a decade ago excluded a significant group of pub-goers (a fact I am ambivalent about).

Then in the wake of the smoking bans the recession turned up; the subsequent austerity-driven real terms fall in wages reduced the amount of disposable income being spent down the pub and, together with other factors such as duties, taxes and planning regulations, this terminally affected the economic viability of many pubs. But this was not just confined to chains that would ruthlessly close any uneconomic pubs and sell them for development: closures have been split equally between the corporate and independent sectors.

Fortunately, in the ten years I have been living in East Sussex, I have not known any of the pubs in my area to close permanently. However, I do recall driving around with a group of work colleagues on a freezing Sunday night in February a few years ago trying to find a pub that had not closed for the night due to lack of customers.

There are two pubs in my village: one has just had a facelift, which can only be a good sign, and the other has been closed intermittently between landlords but now seems to be in a period of stability. I was in both of them last week: the former for a Wednesday night allotment committee meeting (rock ‘n’ roll, I know) and the latter was the scene of my purely social Friday night. Sadly, on both nights, the number of customers struggled to get out of single figures. My own culpability in the neglect of a key feature of the community made me feel guilty and I vowed to regularly support my local boozers. And more of us need to do it because, before we know it, they will be gone forever.

On the Wagon

We are currently in the period of Lent, the six weeks or so that fall between Ash Wednesday and Easter in the Christian calendar. As a reminder of the forty days and nights that Jesus spent resisting temptation in the wilderness, Christians observe episodes of prayer and fasting during Lent. More popularly, it is about ‘giving something up' and, these days, that is more likely to be chocolate, swearing or social media. Lent is also intended to prepare believers for Easter and the solemn marking of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection and all that.

There is no biblical precedent for Lent: like most events in the Christian calendar it is an appropriation of a Pagan festival. The Anglo-Saxon word 'lenctene' referred to the time of year when the days started to lengthen and, after a winter confinement of feasting and wassailing, a period of moderation was required if the land was to be prepared for sowing in the spring. The day before Ash Wednesday is variously called Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras; which one depends on where you are in the world but, whichever it is, it is a carnival day that is the last hurrah before a lengthy period of hard work and abstinence.

With the advent of sponsored 'dryathlons', there is currently something of a trend for this period of temperance to be earlier in the new year; but this is too soon to be on the wagon: January, when the light is thin and the days still short, is precisely the time when we should be holed up at home drinking our way through the most dismal of months. But as the first signs of spring appeared this week, it was a reminder that Lent is a call to lay down the bottle, take up the hoe and get back to the land. So, in the spirit of Paganism, I've given up the booze and started preparing the soil on the allotment. It's tough, but at least the digging is bearable.