Friday 17 February 2012

The pub shaman

Here’s an absolutely brilliant piece on the “Pubs of Manchester” blog, evoking the pub world we have now pretty much entirely lost.

And the shaman who presided over these stories, the men who had spent a lifetime recording and remembering and retelling these tales were red-faced, slightly dishevelled men who not only drank in pubs, but lived in them. My dad was one of those shaman. The clothes he wore were often bought from men who went from pub to pub with a van out back. The meat he ate often came from a similar source. He knew names of landlords, barmaids, owners. He knew which local hardmen to avoid and which to talk to. He knew which pubs had jukeboxes, had pool tables, had darts teams. He knew pubs.

2 comments:

  1. as my son will tell tales of his shaman like father, who knew all the cheap grog offers of all the supermarkets as he laments the decline of the supermarket and the rise of the new fangled "replicator"

    "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there" Leslie Poles Hartley

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  2. It was an amazing post, which drew me in from the start and left me awe struck by the end. Truly fantastic writing.

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