A taste of freedom - Part 2

At the end of last year, I wrote “Despite the optimism surrounding the roll-out of vaccines, I expect I will still have a long wait before I am once again able to enter a pub unchallenged, walk up to the bar to order a drink, and choose to sit wherever, and with whom, I want.” So it proved, and in fact it turned out to be not until the second half of the year, on Monday 19 July.

In February, the Prime Minister announced a roadmap to reopening the country, which many felt at the time was pretty glacial in pace. However, as I said at the time, if it all went to plan, we might eventually find ourselves looking back on it all as a bad dream. Well, that worked out well, didn’t it?

The first key milestone was allowing pubs to open outdoors only from 12 April, but unfortunately that presaged a spell of wet and windy weather that prevented them taking maximum advantage. I’m never a great fan of outdoor drinking at the best of times, and in fact the sole occasion on which I took advantage of this was a trip to Stonehouse Brewery in Shropshire on a cool but dry day, where I was made very welcome by proprietor Shane Parr.

The next milestone on the roadmap came on 17 May, when pubs were finally allowed to open indoors, albeit under such severe restrictions that, as I wrote, “created a regimented, cheerless experience that largely destroys the pleasure of the swift, casual pint.” A further problem was that it seems that many licensees missed a vocation as a prison warder, and chose to gold-plate these rules and add some extra of their own. Yes, rules are rules, but it is a choice whether to apply them with a light touch or a heavy hand. This attitude seemed to be more common in independent venues than corporate ones.

As I wrote at the time, I don’t go to pubs to be told off, and when every visit involves a potential confrontation I’m really not inclined to bother. One exception was Wetherspoon’s, who don’t have the staff to micromanage the behaviour of their customers, but the amount of atmosphere in a Spoons operating table service only is on a par with that of the celestial body that gives its name to many of their pubs. I did find one local pub that wasn’t laying it on with a trowel, but in general speculative pub visits were off the agenda.

The end of the tunnel was supposed to come on 21 June, and I was looking forward to a birthday pub crawl of Stockport three days later. However, following doom-mongering predictions from SAGE – which unsurprisingly turned out to be wildly pessimistic – it ended up being postponed by another four weeks. But it did happen at last on Monday 19 July, despite warnings from all the usual suspects that opening up would be a recipe for disaster.

So I was in the Boar’s Head in Stockport before noon on that day, and was pleased to see that the normal habits of pub life had resumed. In the following weeks I was able to resume my usual pattern of pubgoing. While a handful of pubs still adhered to the “old religion”, resulting in giving them a swerve, in general pubs seemed to be the area of society where Covid paranoia had most receded.

I was able to have a holiday and go on a number of pub trips, the best of which was a day out in Stockport which involved people travelling from as far away as Kent. While I wouldn’t say that levels of trade reached pre-Covid levels, there seemed to be a steady build-up of customer confidence, which was most marked in the Castle in Macclesfield on 5 November, which was standing room only and absolutely rammed.

However, this was put into sharp reverse at the end of November when concerns about the Omicron variant led to some restrictions being reimposed. While they didn’t directly affect pubs, there was a clear impact on people’s enthusiasm for going out, combined with the reintroduction of the working from home guidance which severely hit pubs in major urban centres. This led to a collapse in business, particularly in organised party bookings, although it seems that trade in community locals has held up better. There is now plenty of evidence that the worst fears about the effect of Omicron were exaggerated, but pubs in England have been left in a kind of limbo wondering whether they are going to be imminently shackled or closed down again.

During the year, I visited 79 different pubs, of which 18 were new to me, almost half of which were on one holiday in Norfolk. While I did have a number of pub days out, they were all to places I had been to before. This compares with 60 and 17 in 2020, when the pubs were open without significant restrictions for perhaps a couple of weeks less. In contrast, in 2019 I visited no less than 111 new pubs, buoyed by four days out in towns where collectively I had only previously visited one pub, and four holidays in places where there was still plenty to explore.

Of the new pubs visited, nothing really stood out as an absolute must-visit. People had spoken highly of the Crown & Mitre in King’s Lynn, but I don’t think I caught it at the best time, and I was feeling a bit out of sorts as well. Probably those that stick most in the mind are a couple of unassuming locals – the Cart & Horses in Astley in South Lancashire, where retired miner Gordon Williams had been visiting four times a week for 75 years, and the Plough in Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, a cosy little Bass pub just off the town centre.

The best revisit of the year was undoubtedly the Anchor at High Offley in Staffordshire. There had been fears that this unique, unspoilt canalside pub might close permanently after the death of long-serving licensee Olive Cliff, but fortunately it has been taken over and reopened by her daughter Elaine. On a sunny Sunday lunchtime in August all the tables in the extensive beer garden were occupied. I ran into members of the Stafford & Stone Branch of CAMRA who were presenting the pub with an award recognising Olive’s long service, including Paul Mudge, who I had not met since our trip to Burton in March 2020.

On a trip to Chester, I called in at the Olde Cottage and had a chat with licensee Trevor, who has chronicled on Twitter the financial and emotional pain so many pubs have experienced during nearly two years of on/off lockdowns. Not a classic heritage pub, but a buzzing local on the edge of the city centre with a loyal band of regulars. I was unfortunate, though, to miss making the acquaintance of their pub cat Arty, who was upstairs enjoying his beauty sleep.

In contrast, I was disappointed by the Great Western in Wolverhampton, a pub that I would have classed as one of my absolute favourites, but which seemed to have been oddly sanitised by a recent refurbishment. Perhaps it would grow on me as it wears in.

I missed Arty in the Olde Cottage, and sadly Felix, the large black-and-white cat at the Boar’s Head in Stockport, had died earlier this year at the age of 16, so I didn’t encounter a single pub cat during the year. However, here’s a delightful picture of Malt and Hops in the Wellington in Birmingham city centre which was posted on Twitter by Jules Saunders.

Follow these links for Part 1 and Part 3 of this review. .