Stairway to heaven

The other week I called in to the Ship at Styal, an attractive Cheshire country pub that has recently been refurbished by multiple operators Kalton & Barlow after having become rather tired under pub company ownership. It’s been smartly done up in gastro-style, and I had quite a reasonable pint of Timothy Taylor’s Boltmaker. However, one thing I noticed is that the toilets had been moved upstairs to make more room on the ground floor.

This is a familiar feature of Wetherspoons, but more recently it’s been spreading to other pubs as well. I wrote recently how pubs seemed to be increasingly turning a cold shoulder to older drinkers and, while Spoons do seem to be popular with the grey market, this is something that is far from ideal for them. There are many elderly people who are not disabled as such, but would struggle with long flights of stairs, especially if their bladder capacity is not what it was. I’ve heard it said of some Spoons that “it’s so far to the bogs, once you’ve been and come back you want to go again.”

In some Spoons I’ve seen people who struggle a bit to walk using the disabled toilet, often with the tacit approval of the staff, but to feel forced to do so involves something of a loss of dignity. So maybe, with an increasingly ageing population, this is one example of how pubs could to take the concept of being pensioner-friendly seriously.

Incidentally, I’ve never come across upstairs or basement toilets in any of the new Greene King and Marston’s dining pubs, which suggests they have a keen eye on where much of their trade comes from.

Show your colours

I happened to come across this graphic on Twitter the other day, and thought it would be worthy of a retweet.

I scarcely expected the volume of anti-smoking and anti-pub abuse I would be subjected to, which has resulted in a number of intolerant pub-hating individuals either unfollowing me or being unfollowed.

Maybe the message is a touch strident and invites accusations of Godwin’s Law. But intolerance was a key feature of Naziism, and the Nazis can be said to have begun the modern-day anti-smoking mania. Surely, since the smoking ban has been so devastating to the pub trade, pubs should be fully entitled to declare their disagreement with the law – even though they are forced to comply with it – and many would see that as a welcome manifestation of an independent, rebellious spirit.

Sowing paranoia

My last post referred to the imminent reduction of the drink-drive limit in Scotland. On a non-beer-related forum I frequent, this led to a remarkable outbreak of paranoia, with ludicrous speculation about the Scottish police carrying out “hot pursuit” of suspected offenders across the border, and people wondering when they would ever be safe to have a drink, and asking whether they needed to buy a personal breathalyser if they sometimes enjoyed a few midweek pints and drove to work the following morning.

While I yield to no-one in my opposition to this law, in fact there are well-established rules of thumb that should help to set their minds at rest, but don’t tend to have the currency they once enjoyed. When I learned to drive in the 1970s, it was drummed in to me by my father and other adults that, to avoid falling foul of the law, I should drink no more than two pints of ordinary-strength beer when driving. Of course, in those days there wasn’t much else around other than ordinary-strength beer. And two pints was a figure that would keep you comfortably below the limit, not end up nudging against it.

This is borne out by this 1986 leaflet produced by the Transport and Road Research Laboratory which states clearly that if an 11-stone man drinks two pints of ordinary-strength beer, his blood-alcohol level would reach a maximum of 60 mg. Given this, it follows that drinking just one pint should not take you anywhere near a 50mg limit, and one and a half may well be OK for gentlemen of more substantial build. Of course nowadays the picture is clouded by the availability of many stronger beers, but if you’ve lost count of how much you’ve had it’s probably fair to say you’re not fit to drive the following morning. Whether you would think it worthwhile to go to the pub just to drink one pint is another matter.

The other point is that, regardless of how much you’ve had in the first place, alcohol is cleared from the system at the rate of about one unit an hour. This explains why people who’ve had a skinful can still be over the limit the following tea-time but, on the other hand, if you’ve had four pints and stopped drinking at 11 pm, you’ll probably have a blood-alcohol level of zero by 8 am the following morning, and are vanishingly unlikely to still be over the limit. It’s also important to remember that, while various factors such as the type of drink and whether or not you’ve eaten at the same time will affect how swiftly alcohol is absorbed into the bloodstream, the maximum potential blood alcohol level that any particular drink will produce remains unchanged. There’s no way that a half of lager, even if drunk on an empty stomach, is going to take you anywhere near.

But this reaction underlines the point that the key motivation behind this legislation is to make normal, responsible people think twice about drinking alcohol, not just immediately before driving, but most of the time. If the real objective was improving road safety, then an honest publicity campaign about how to keep within the law, including a much greater focus on the morning after, combined with an increase in targeted enforcement activity, would be much more effective. Knowing someone who has been breathalysed, even if they passed, is the best deterrent. But reducing the limit without any increase in enforcement will do nothing to deter those who are already breaking the current limit, and indeed may be perceived as legitimising their behaviour.

At the end of the day, it’s not about safety, it’s about denormalisation, and it certainly seems to be working.

Merry Christmas Scotland!

Scotland’s Justice Secretary Kenny McAskill has put a dampener on Scotland’s upcoming Christmas and New Year celebrations by promising to cut the country’s drink-drive limit on 5 December. I’m sure all Scots will welcome him throwing a dark blanket of prohibitionist gloom over them.

I’ve written on this before, and there’s not much more I can add. The idea that English drivers could be banned from driving in England for doing something in Scotland that is entirely legal south of the Border is utterly disgraceful. And I continue to believe that this is essentially an anti-drink and anti-pub measure, not a road safety one.

The Scottish pub scene is distinctively different, and the country doesn’t really have the characterful rural and village pubs that are such a distinctive feature of England. However, this move will have a negative effect across the whole pub trade, and inevitably lead to renewed calls for a limit cut south of the Border.

And I don’t believe it will save a single life.

Such a nice little pub

Tandleman writes here about his very positive experience of drinking in the Mill Road area of Cambridge. This is an area of densely-packed Victorian terraced housing that has now been largely taken-over by middle-class residents, but has retained its corner pubs, although they have very much changed in character. He suggests that a large proportion of the population is students, but I would guess that many residents are professional people working in the University and the city’s booming science-based industries.

Areas – and pubs – like this can be found in many of the cathedral cities and university towns across the South and East of England. I was recently in St Albans where the Sopwell district just across the road from the Cathedral is very much like this, with pubs like the Garibaldi and White Hart Tap (pictured). They’re essentially locals, not destination ale shrines, but will offer a variety of beers and are likely to be doing good business even on evenings early in the week. They’ll serve evening meals, provide newspapers and magazines for customers to read, and host a variety of activities such as pub quizzes, folk music and themed food nights.

You don’t really find that kind of thing around here, as the historic pattern of development is different and pubs tend to cluster in local centres rather than in the back streets. Where extensive areas of Victorian terraces do survive, they’re often now largely devoid of pubs. Probably the nearest thing I can think of locally is the Olde Vic in Edgeley, which isn’t really the same, but does have a very different atmosphere from the Castle Street pubs and attracts some of Edgeley’s growing number of middle-class residents.

When done well, this can to my taste provide a very congenial style of pub. But, to those who are used to drinking in that kind of area, it would be a mistake to imagine it is representative of much of the rest of the country.

In the air tonight

With an impressive 119 votes, the poll on wi-fi in pubs shows almost two-thirds (64%) either being indifferent or seeing its absence as a positive, and only 36% considering it a must-have or highly desirable feature. The point of asking this question is not to criticise its presence as, after all, unlike such things as loud music or screaming children, it scarcely impinges on other customers, but rather those who see pubs as simply a list of “facilities” and feel aggrieved if one lacks the particular feature that interests them. Surely it’s a good thing that pubs aren’t all the same.

On a recent pub-crawl of Edgeley, one of the more down-to-earth parts of Stockport, one fairly traditional pub was advertising free wi-fi as you went in through to door, so obviously it’s becoming pretty commonplace. However, I have to say that (perhaps because I am short-sighted) that browsing the internet on a smartphone cuts you off much more from what is going on in the rest of the pub than reading a newspaper, so possibly to some extent it might promote disconnection and social isolation.

Some more equal than others?

Some years ago, it was not uncommon for pubs to employ people with mild learning disabilities as potmen to collect empty glasses. They may not have been paid very much, but it gave them something purposeful to do and increased their sense of self-worth. This is something you don’t seem to see any more. Partly, no doubt, because pub tables are no longer groaning with empty pint glasses the way they used to be, but also, I suspect, because the introduction of the national minimum wage meant that licensees felt it was no longer economic to employ them.

This was brought to mind by the recent furore over Lord Freud’s comments that it might be preferable to allow some disabled people to work for less than the minimum wage than for them not to work at all. Many of his critics seem to have missed the point that personal worth is not the same as economic worth. Of course people are all equally valuable as individuals, but it’s a fact of life in every society that some people are paid more than others because their economic contribution is greater. Wayne Rooney earns more in a day than most of us do in a year, but that doesn’t mean he works any harder or is any better a person.

The comment was also not directed at disabled people in general. Although it was not always the case in the past, it is universally acknowledged now that people with physical disabilities lack nothing in mental acuity compared to the able-bodied. But few would deny that there are people with learning disabilities who may be capable of a limited amount of straightforward work under close supervision, but whose capability falls well short of that of a non-disabled person. Given that, to employ them and pay them the full minimum wage would be an act of charity, not a rational business decision.

This point was recognised by Mencap when the minimum wage was originally introduced in 2000, when they argued that that a special category of therapeutic placements should be introduced for people whose capability was well below that of non-disabled staff. If the government wanted to preserve the principle of the minimum wage, they could top up their payments to that level, which would probably be offset anyway by a reduction in benefit payouts.

This would help in giving disabled people more of a sense of purpose and self-esteem, and it may be that experience of work would improve their abilities and self-confidence and allow them to earn more. That is surely preferable to leaving them languishing on benefits because you think they’re not just good enough to work at all. The very fact that people are paid gives them more incentive and motivation than unpaid activity. As the article says,

Steve Beyer, deputy director of the Welsh centre for learning disabilities at the University of Wales, said studies showed that people with severe disabilities could benefit "very considerably" from work in terms of motivation and skills development.

He said: "For many people, the alternative is going to a local authority day centre. Although good examples do exist, there is plenty of research around to show that day centres are generally segregated and that they provide at worst a lower level of activity, a lower level of development and a lower level of interest."

Big-headedness

The photo attached to my previous post raises an interesting question. It shows five old boys sitting in a rural Dorset pub in 1934, each with a traditional straight-sided tankard about two-thirds full of beer, but with a head reaching almost to the top of the glass. Depictions of beer from the inter-war period, whether photos or drawings, often show foaming heads, and of course immediately after the war the Ancient Order of Front-Blowers was formed. They wouldn’t have been able to blow froth if there hadn’t been much there in the first place.

In those days there wouldn’t have been any electric pumps or swan-necks, and a lot more beer, especially in rural pubs, would have been dispensed by gravity. Nowadays we tend to associate gravity dispense and unsparklered handpumps with a fairly thin, shallow head, so you have to wonder whether they were doing something different in those days. Maybe it was a case of deliberately producing frothy pints just for the camera, but perhaps sparklers were more commonplace than we now think, or it could have been the usual practice to let the beer develop more condition, which can be done by a variation in cellar practice. It’s entirely possible to produce a thick, lasting head by gravity dispense from a newly-tapped cask.

It’s certainly my subjective impression that over the past forty years cask beer has tended, on average, to be served with less condition than it used to be, and you get a fair bit of beer that is not off as such, but just very flat and tired. Possibly the ending of the opportunity for a bit of hard-spiling offered by the afternoon break has something to do with it.

This brings to mind the North-East practice of “bankers”, which I have heard about but never actually seen. What this involved was serving a half into a pint glass and letting the head rise almost to the rim, then setting it on one side and, a few minutes later, carefully topping it up so the head protruded well above the top of the glass. Sometimes pubs would draw a whole row of these in anticipation of thirsty miners or steelworkers coming in at the end of their shift, which is where the name comes from. They might even put them in a fridge to keep them cool. I wonder if that still goes on. And was that technique once more common across the country?

No country for old men

A recent report by the International Longevity Centre has highlighted the growing problem of social isolation amongst older men living alone. Men seem to find it more difficult to make and maintain social contacts than women, and many will have largely depended on their wives or partners for their social life and found themselves cut adrift when they died or divorced. The report predicts that the number of older men living alone in England will increase by 65% by 2030.

You might have thought pubs had a role to play in tackling this issue, but in fact things have gone the other way. A generation ago, it wasn’t uncommon to see groups of old codgers in pubs, maybe playing a game of crib or doms, or just chewing the fat while nursing a pint of mild. But that wasn’t seen as a very lucrative trade, nor something that conveyed the right image. So many pubs were remodelled to appeal to a younger audience, with loud music, TV screens and uncomfortable posing tables, while others went all-out for the dining trade and made it clear that social drinkers, especially slow-spending ones, weren’t really welcome.

Then the smoking ban came along and made even more customers feel unwelcome. As one commenter often reminds us, older people will be particularly resistant to being forced out into the cold and rain, while non-smokers may have found the pub less appealing once their smoking friends had stopped going. Large numbers of pubs have closed entirely, while others have taken the commercial decision to stop opening on weekday lunchtimes, which for many pensioners was their favoured drinking session. And the remorseless drip-drip of anti-drink propaganda has created something of a stigma about pubgoing that wasn’t there twenty or thirty years ago.

Wetherspoon’s are often mocked for the number of customers using mobility scooters, but surely this should be seen as a positive sign that they are actually providing a social function for older people. I was recently in a branch in a fairly workaday town in the South-East where this was very noticeable. But Spoons tend in general to be located in town centres, so don’t act as local pubs near to where people live, and they’re also not noted for seating comfort.

The industry often claims that pubs play a vital role in communities, and in the best cases that’s undoubtedly true. But maybe they need to live up to the hype and take a long, hard look at making their venues more pensioner-friendly. After all, it’s the only growing section of the potential drinking population. And the argument that it’s encouraging excessive drinking amongst the elderly doesn’t really stand up, as most will only have a pint or two anyway.

Out of touch?

Mark Daniels complains here about pubs failing to offer free wi-fi, and reckons that “talk to each other instead” has become a hackneyed excuse that is no longer funny. Now, it’s up to each individual pub to decide whether providing wi-fi makes commercial sense, and unlike some other “features” such as Sky Sports it doesn’t really impinge on other customers’ experience.

However, this view stems from the attitude that pubs should be contemporary, wipe-clean, family-friendly retail outlets where the more “facilities” they offer the better. Surely, though, a pub is more than just a business – it is about tradition, character and community, and very often pubs are valued as places where people can escape, if only for a couple of hours, from the stresses and pressures of everyday life.

Personally, while I might avail myself of the facility in Spoons or wherever, I’d see a pub making a point of not providing wi-fi as a positive feature. You wouldn’t whinge about its absence in a church or a historic house, and the same should be true of pubs.

I’ve created a new poll on the issue here.