Review of the Year 2023 – Part 1

2023 was the first full year since 2019 that the pub trade was entirely free of Covid restrictions or the threat of them being reimposed. However, the ongoing Covid enquiry is raking over the coals once again, although its purpose seems more to be the attribution of blame than any rational cost-benefit analysis of the response. It also suffers from the ongoing delusion that there could have been some kind of magical super-lockdown that would have sorted everything out.

This resulted in the best trading conditions since 2019, although the cost pressures imposed by high inflation have been an ongoing problem. There has also been continued political turmoil domestically and war in several places on the international stage. The idea that we are eventually going to return to some kind of calmer waters comes across as wishful thinking.

During the course of the year, I have visited 149 different pubs, of which 46 were new to me, with the possibility of adding one or two more to the total in the remaining days of December (The final figures were 152 and 47). This was the highest figure since 2019. As I said last year, obviously I could have visited more new pubs if I’d really set my mind to it, but I didn’t really do more than take the opportunities that were available to me in the course of my travels.

The best new pub I visited was undoubtedly the Templar, a bustling, atmospheric pub in Leeds city centre that preserves many original internal features. I had heard good things about it from various people, which were confirmed.

An honourable mention goes to the Blue Mugge in Leek, a multi-roomed street-corner local just outside the town centre that manages to do a good lunchtime trade when most others in similar locations nowadays would be closed during the week. I also visited the Bridge Inn at Topsham in Devon, a well-known National Inventory classic although, while it undoubtedly has a wonderfully unspoilt interior, for some reason, possibly related to the time of day when I called, it failed to click with me in terms of pub atmosphere.

I revisited a couple of Cheshire classics that I hadn’t been to for too long. The Traveller’s Rest at Alpraham had recently been severely damaged by impact from a heavy lorry, confining drinkers to one room at the back, although the licensee was hopeful of being able to claim on insurance and restore it to its former glory.

The Harp at Little Neston, looking out over the marshes of the silted-up Dee estuary, was pretty much the same as I remembered it. I managed to pay my first visit since before Covid to the Black Horse at Clapton-in-Gordano in Somerset, which lived up to my recollection that it is hard to find a better example of a characterful rural or village pub, although on this occasion their signature beer Courage Best was not available.

Five years ago, I wrote about how my father had enjoyed his last pint in a pub in the Golden Lion in Frodsham in the Autumn of 2009. I had not been back since I called in shortly after he did to tell the other customers who knew him that he was no longer with us, but I managed to get in there again this year. It’s a Sam Smith’s pub and has now lost its cask OBB, but I had a good drop of their reformulated XXXX Best light mild. It was given a tasteful refurbishment a few years ago and, with a blazing fire in the grate, it was easy to imagine escaping from the world there for a few hours on a dark November day.

I haven’t encountered a single pub cat on my travels, although I am assured there are plenty of them out there. I did call in to the Olde Cottage in Chester where Arty, who turned up unannounced in 2019, has recently celebrated his fourth birthday. However, apparently his routine is to get his beauty sleep around teatime and only venture down to the bar late in the evening.

This year, I have made 51 posts on this blog, including this one and its sequel, which is a slight increase on the 45 of 2022. Realistically, the heady days of 294 in 2011 are never coming back, as all of the brief thoughts have migrated to Twitter, but I’ve managed to keep up a steady output, with a particular rush of blood to the head in November, when I achieved 7.

The most views were for this one on why beer writers and commentators get a distorted view of cask beer quality, which ended up being widely shared. Also well-read were my thoughts on the likely outcome of the 3.4% beer duty cut-off, which is of ongoing relevance, and my post on the inadequacies of micropub toilets also proved popular for its scatological implications.

A particularly salient post was At the Sign of the Dead Horse, where I made the point that many “save-the-pub” campaigners fail to acknowledge the extent to which social and legislative changes over the years have combined to undermine the demand for pubgoing, and also reminded them that you can’t force commercial companies to keep pubs open if they do not see them as viable.

The blog continues to attract a healthy volume of comments, but sadly some fall into the category of “low-grade snark” and can’t really be said to add anything constructive, so I’ve been inclined not to approve some that are either offensive or irrelevant.

My Closed Pubs blog saw a sad milestone in its 1000th entry, the rather magnificent Pagefield Hotel in Wigan. A total of 81 pubs (there are two still to be uploaded between now and New Year) is a little below last year, but still the second-highest annual total since the early days of shooting fish in a barrel. The demise of the Fullpint news aggregration Twitter account closed off a useful source of leads, but I have continued to receive a steady stream of suggestions from Leeds resident Kyle Reed, which explains why Yorkshire has overtaken Staffordshire as the county with the second-highest number of entries, and is now hot on the heels of Lancashire.

I have also continued to add pubs from time to time to my Campaign for Real Pubs blog, including both the Templar and the Blue Mugge which I mentioned earlier.

One of the highlights of other blogs was this rather poignant piece from Cooking Lager looking back to the days of his youth while visiting the remaining pubs of Hillgate on a Sunday afternoon. He really does need to do more blogging!

I walked home happier than I began. My melancholy shifted with a few pints drank slowly over an afternoon. Smiling over a memory of a time 4 lads liked a drink, walked around some pubs because we were told those were the pubs you should go round and laughed a lot and enjoyed themselves and had hope and excitement at the prospect of leaving home and going to universities. Something to keep and treasure and remind myself of. The gift of still being here. That extra time I’ve been given, they were denied. There’s more to do, more to see, more memories to make. Of places, of people, of good times, of bad times, and time to enjoy a drink. Play until the whistle. Play every moment. The whistle is coming.

See here for Part 2.