I have been thinking a lot about the pub; or lack thereof for quite a while.

I was lucky enough to be brought up and witness the end of the pub crawl, a ritual undertaken by all walks of life up and down the country. It was a simple idea really. You come home on a Friday night after a hard week’s graft, and got ready to go out to start the weekend; there was an enjoyment in doing the simplest of things. Changing clothes to go out always had to be accompanied by some good music. Not just anything; but fist pumping back beats and catchy melodies you’ll have stuck in your head for the next hour. Your dinner was prepared quickly but it was never just reheated leftovers from Thursday… it was always something special even if it was just a trip to the chippy on your way home. As soon as you finished your private rituals you set off for the pub.

The pubs back then were laid heavy with smoke, stale beer and perpetually gloomy even though the sun had not yet set. People who ordered food in such places were looked at with disdain; this was a Friday night after all and good times should be had by all.

The first pint was always a risk… most of the time it had been in the pipes since last night so a gut wrenching sour after taste almost always accompanied it. There was no real ale… there was a choice between: bitter, lager or Guinness; all of which kind of tasted the same and you differentiated between them by the cost and alcohol percentage. Now cost, there is a touchy subject, and one I’ll return to later.

But the first pint was always a good one; no matter how sour watered down it may be. It was a symbol of breaking the tyranny of the 9-5 day and recognising you would not need to wake up early to go into work tomorrow. One by one your friends started to gather to be greeted with choruses of “hellos” or in some cases people who you have not seen for a while by cheers.

One pint became two; two became three; and invariably the subject was raised: where to next?

Nights out were never a single pub; there were several pubs; meeting different people in each one your group splitting up, merging from pub to pub. Some pubs were noted for their great jukeboxes; others for their atmosphere. Sometimes another part of our anatomy did the talking and other pubs were suggested simply because we knew other people will be there. Debates were raged over the benefits of each pub and the group flowed from one to another – driven by seemingly random impulses across town.

Towns and cities back then were heaving with revealers relishing the fact it was the weekend travelling back and forth between the many pubs which dotted our towns. I have been out recently and you no longer see the trains of people moving between pubs… just single groups here and there moving between the few pubs which remain. When I first started going out there were bouncers on most pub doors – simply to make sure the place did not become too overcrowded. This was Friday nights out on the town, every weekend; Saturday nights sometimes as well; but that never had the same “just off work feel” that the magical Friday gave.

I’m sorry that people who are turning 18 now cannot experience the pub culture and crawl; in the glimpses of young people I have seen around town these days the entire premise seems to revolve around vodka and how fast you can drink it in a trendy bar with hard lines and cold lighting. Nights drinking sterilised and chemically pure alcohol in various fizzy and fruity concoctions in a cool over-metallic environment. The weird smell of smoke machines and too much Lynx following them around all night.

You are not likely to bump into an old man at the bar who twists your ear about politics; there is no old dusty settee in the corner which had lost all its spring long ago. There is no travel between the different pubs to experience each character. There is no need. There is a bar which has the same type of people and the same layout as the last one. Always too cold; and always the same. Dozens of ramshackle little pubs with less space than an Ethiopian grain storage silo are replaced with sprawling “state of the art” and neon bars.

Have we progressed? I think not. The decent few pubs who remain are always on the verge of collapse with groups of patrons sitting in the corder mumbling in the corner about the prices of beer. When I was 18 I went out with a tenner in my pocket and it was enough for six pints of beer and either a taxi home or a kebab; and that was more than ample to have a good time.

So what does this mean for the Friday night this week?

Well I plan to have a couple of pints in the pub and go home early… perhaps picking up a few cans from the shop. There is no dancing to oasis when you are getting dressed to go out any-more; there is no changing your razor blade for a new one; and there is no more pub crawl… in fact the last pub crawl I was in involved a car… as the distances were too far to walk.

Beer festival · Blackburn · crawl · ethopia · friday · friends · night · oasis · pub · Thwaites · youth

If you have ever written a letter to Tim Wetherspoon (his lesser-known boyband name) please stop reading now, for the coming paragraphs will only antagonise you and prompt you into spending the next three hours sat at your desk penning a furious response, something along the lines of…

Dear Richard,

Myself and my wife have always greatly enjoyed your fine tales, drinking adventures and reasonably priced exploits in drunkenness. However, your recent mockery of Mr Tim Martin by means of illustrating how shit the food his miserable teenage staff make was, I must say, beneath the belt. Myself and my wife have many a time enjoyed Mr Tim Martin’s reasonably priced shit food, washed down with a pleasant drink – often “gratis”!!! In future, please leave this stalwart of great British business out of your so-called “discussions” of comically inedible food.

Regards,

Mr P Dimmond, Nuneaton

You will pass it to your secretary to proof-read, studiously ignoring any suggestions she makes; then you’ll email it to your wife at home, basking in the glowing reply she sends half an hour later. “Susan! Have this in the next post, post haste!” Please, if you don’t like hearing a bad word about your favourite local reasonably priced retailer of food and drink, stop reading now and save yourself that letter.

Over the last decade I’ve seen a lot change in my town, Blackburn, in ways that haven’t been seen in similar nearby towns. Quite a lot of pubs have disappeared and there are a few reasons why: first came the trial of late-night licensing in a few select pubs in the town centre. Blackburn was a guinea pig for this around the turn of the century, so I caught both sides of the scene, before and after the changes. First it was 1am, then 2am and by now it’s 4am. Everybody loved this at first – it was a chance to go out at a normal time and if you fancied, stay out an hour longer! Brilliant. Indeed it was, until the shift began towards people realising they could stay out later, so they could stay at home drinking first and come out later. Net effect: town centre pubs became mostly vacant until 10pm within a few years of this change.

The second cause has been the shift in drinking habits among my generation and the one beneath me. Alcopops and ciders have enabled younger and younger people to begin drinking in their own groups. They tend to favour bars and clubs – what I call anti-pubs – and a shift began around a decade ago that converted some of Blackburn’s old pubs into bars. Virtually instantly, that’s a place off the map for anyone who enjoyed a normal pub. On top of that, the bars don’t open in the day so it’s become a pub desert during the afternoon. It’s only an aside, albeit a sad one, that many of these converted bars are now closed altogether so whole streets have become pub- and bar-free.

The Postal Order: the scourge of real pubs. Courtesy of Cottontown.

And so we come to what I’d suggest is the third cause: yep, you guessed it, JD Wetherspoon. In Blackburn’s case it’s the Postal Order, occupying a grand old building pretty much right in the town centre. The effect when it opened was immediate: queues three or four deep at weekends and busy during the week. As Blackburn has died off, this has died off with it, but the proportional effect is still there: it always has a larger share of the trade than anywhere else in town, even if the total trade is lower. On any given afternoon, if you took all the old men, all the students and all the drunks out of the Postal Order and redistributed them across the town centre, there’d be enough business to keep three or four pubs alive.

That’s the first thing I’ve always vaguely resented the Postal Order for. I’ve always gone in there, had some good times over the years, but at the back of my mind I’d have always been happy to pay an extra 50p to be in a proper pub. Why didn’t I just go to a real pub, of course you’re asking? Well, that’s my point – Wetherspoons played a part in killing them off. If you haven’t been to Blackburn I can’t begin to describe what a desert it is in the town centre for an actual, normal pub. If you’re looking for some dinner and a pint, well, you’ve got two choices – there or O’Neills. That’s it. I resent them for crumbling away the choice of pubs in this town.

The second thing I’ve always been a little bitter about is that the place isn’t even good. It’d be much more palatable if the ultimate mega-pub in the world had shot up and the opposition had died off naturally – but no, the Postal Order has just emerged like a giant turd mound and swallowed everything beneath it. It’s battered, it’s always messy, the staff are so underpaid and overworked they change every week and don’t give a damn. Losing our genuine pubs to this beast is like Mike Tyson losing his arms at the peak of his career to some poxy infection he got from a splinter. One of the standard replies people always give in that apathetic, apologist voice is “well, the food’s alright…” purely to justify that they know they keep going back for the cheap beer. Well, the food is shite and you know it. These two recent experiences, by myself and Alex, made me realise just how little people are willing to accept in the name of a cheap drink. Exhibit A:

I think this is a Japanese innovation, boil-and-eat-in-the-bag.

Come on, Mr P Dimmond from Nuneaton, what is that?! I know you only defend the place because it’s the only pub you feel safe going in these days and your ego needs some assurance, but how many times have you seen shite like this and mentally glazed over the absurdity of it by rationalising that it’s cheap or just repeating the mantra, “the food’s alright”?

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit B:

The most appetising ham, egg and chips you'll ever have fortune to witness, courtesy of Alex.

I think it has become a too well-received piece of wisdom that the food in Wetherspoons “is alright”. It has, in effect, become a byword for saying “the food is shite but I want a cheap beer so I’m still going to go there”. This apathy has ended up with the only pubs I can go to for dinner in this town being a Wetherspoons, an O’Neills and a place that sells toasties to students with house music in the background. Tim Martin, credit to him, has built a successful business upon people’s levels of tolerance: until something is truly absurd and unacceptable, they will tolerate a great deal in the name of a cheap pint.

Perhaps I should have addressed all of this to Tim Wetherspoon himself. Let’s have a try.

Dear Tim,

I have always enjoyed your reasonably priced selection of fine ales, stouts and porters. Being a single man I have no wife to share these with, a fact which often sends me to sleep at night in a sinking pit of gentle weeping, but your occasional “meet the brewer” nights more than make up for this.

However, I must take umbridge with the decimation of my local pub scene at your hands. Like the Stay Puft Man rampaging through the streets of New York, you have wrought devastation in a seemingly carefree manner. I am left wondering if myself and a small bunch of maverick friends must cross streams in your award-winning yet strangely jaded urinals to put a stop to your rampage.

Please cease the expansion of your soulless empire at the earliest opportunity and allow a few real pubs to flourish.

Regards,

Richard

Blackburn · food · Ghostbusters · J D Wetherspoon · Postal Order · pub closures

Orthodoxy has historically proven to be a trait of a) Greek Christians and b) people whose genome is so lacking in originality they class Phil Cool as cutting edge, spend their existence working to pay for an achingly formulaic semi-detached home and then die, leaving behind children whose memories of them extend as far as “he never turned up late for work”.

Orthodoxy, then, is not for Badpoo. If the world of beer had a map, it would have more avenues than New York and each one needs exploring. It is a shame that in many beer publications the same avenues are strolled down again and again, like an amiable family walk on a warm Sunday afternoon. Orthodoxy is the immediate impression, and it’s a pity because in its very nature beer has the capacity to take a person to great highs and lows and they are by definition more involving tales than the hoppiness of this week’s summer ale.

To it is, then, to the opticians with a gin.

I’ve had a strange time of late, vacillating wildly from day to day but old enough to know how to stay functional. There might have been a 30 Days, 30 Drinks Day 13: drinking in a dark place post in there somewhere, but those kind of tales don’t generally work out for the best so I stayed silent. Coming out of this stage in a better state of mind, and with a renewed enthusiasm for drinking in absurd places for the amusement of strangers, I went to my opticians appointment at noon today with a can of gin and tonic in hand.

Gin. This photo is here purely for your pleasure.

This was a spur of the moment thing, just like my bottle of Traquair by Ullswater. I told a friend last weekend that I had the urge to drink and write but it didn’t happen and that’s been weighing on my mind ever since, so when I wandered through Tesco killing time today before my appointment, and I saw those discreet cans of spirits that have appeared in the last year or two, a sordid little idea popped into my head. The most enjoyable brand of thought, surely.

I walked into the opticians, a new one to me: characterless, vacant, shoppers walking past the vast glass walls gazing in at the four-eyed fools checking once again just how bad their vision is. I spoke to the receptionist, a sad-sounding girl with a look of resentment in her eyes; who wants to work on a Saturday? An irritating wave of empathy flooded me and I began to regret being there, so I took a seat. These cans of spirits, pre-mixed with some kind of nauseating fizzy drink, are quite discreet so I wasn’t overly troubled with it sat in my hand. It looks like you’re drinking one of those miniscule cans of Coke that you see at childrens parties. Quite comfortable.

By nature I am subtle, quite quiet, somewhat reserved, not fond of attention. This is why sitting in an opticians with a can of gin troubled me quite greatly. I felt a curious blend of exhileration and fear, simultaneously enjoying the absurdity of having a crafty short while having my eyes checked out and utterly dreading what would happen if that poor receptionist challenged me. I don’t know which I enjoyed more: the simple comedy or the thrill of the chase.

That small can stayed with me throughout a battery of eye tests by the first optician I have ever met who doesn’t have the breath of a decaying dog, it stayed with me throughout my tests on a machine which essentially simulated Picard’s fearsome “four lights” scene and it stayed with me as I looked round at frames afterwards. They must have known what I had. I think I did it because of the intrigue of drinking on an allotment; in a strange way, the risk of being caught made something so actually meaningless quite interesting. I would recommend drinking gin in an opticians to people who find everyday life quite predictable and seek a small thrill of a weekend, but not those who think drinking gin while you’re having an eye test is inherently stupid.

The day: 13.
The drink: gin and tonic in a can.
The place: Optical Express.
Positives: felt a wave of excitement I had not in the past few weeks.
Negatives: the constant ponderance of what I would actually say if challenged over my behaviour led me to distraction and detracted from my enjoyment.
Conclusion: I’ll probably get wrong glasses because I was drinking gin during my test.

Blackburn · gin · Optical Express · tonic

My drinking so far has taken in solitude and excess, two extremities which I’ve found interesting. It was quite novel appearing to be suicidal and the hazy recollections of being wazzocked on 7% Scottish ale made me laugh the next day, so it’s a thumbs up all round. Unfortunately this means that thinking of something to top these experiences is quite difficult, so it took me having a guest drinker to come up with something new and niche to match them.

To the golf course we go. Five minutes from home but a world away. Terraced houses turn into long lines of trees and homes seem twice as large. This is a typical northern town, crafted at a time when you lived and worked near the mill or you owned the mill and lived on the green hills overlooking the endless terraced streets. Revidge golf course sits at the top of one of these hills, two minutes from my house. Even though the mills are gone, the difference is still distinct.

And so we go back to a place I spent many nights during my youth. Right back at the beginning I drank whatever I could afford, normally either two bottles of red wine for a fiver or whatever cans were on sale. A few years down the line I had money and started to buy drinks I actually liked – two bottles of red wine for a fiver and whatever cans were on sale. The company changed over the years but not much else – I’d quite happily just go out there to sit and have a drink with whoever was around that night.

I went back to the golf course after years away. Nothing has changed. The path down still covers mud, concealed dips, aggressive branches and the house that looks like a millionaire footballer’s. At the bottom you still come out to clear skies and the smell of fresh grass, an expanse of green opening up before you whichever way you look. To the right are the holes where I used to play javelin with the flags and to the left are the men in polo shirts talking about business. Nothing has changed in all these years I’ve been away.

We went to the left, to the steps by the trees lit by the club car park. In the distance is Blackpool Tower, the sea and the sparkling lights of the motorway heading north. In a sudden rush all of this comes back to me. The grass in front of me fills with my friends leaping about, laughing, bottles clinking on the floor. The old tensions come back to me even though I don’t feel them any more – wondering what she thinks about you, wondering if he found you funny, old neuroses bouncing back like balls thrown to the bottom of the sea bed hurling back up to be seen again.

The bottle of lager in my hand feels unfamiliar and I’m with someone who wasn’t there back in the day, but everything else feels the same. The view hasn’t changed and it’s still eerily quiet when you stop talking. The only thing that’s really changed is me. My instincts associate this place at this time of night with a chaotic lifestyle, romantic uncertainty and building up the friendships I still have to this day. But those things don’t feel real any more – they’re just cold memories of being someone else. Drinking here, with a different drink and a different person, feels almost like fraud – trying to latch myself today on to something that belongs in yesterday.

Drinking on the golf course was not an unpleasant experience, but it did feel wrong somehow. It was like watching a cartoon from the 1980s and discovering it was really quite bad – it’s not nice to have your rose-tinted memories tarnished unexpectedly. As much as I love the place, I think it’s somewhere that really belongs in my past.

The day: 10.
The drink: two giant bottles of lager, one mostly thrown across the golf course, and an organic ale.
The place: Revidge golf course.
Positives: enjoyed the view on a pleasant evening.
Negatives: experienced a strange series of flashbacks to a drink-fuelled chaotic youth.
Conclusion: I’m glad I’m not still 19.

Blackburn · golf course · Revidge

Mondays to me are typically a halfway house between feeling slightly jaded after the weekend’s beer exploits, crossed with not really being too bad because I tone things down on Sundays. It’s like that first day feeling vaguely human again after having an irritating cold for a week. This being the way it is, it’s not often I fancy a dinnertime pint on a Monday.

Having had a quiet weekend, though, I got the taste on the Monday just gone and tried a bottle of Theakston XB with my dinner. It wasn’t cheap; £3.15 for the bottle, and this is from a council-owned cafe (Blakeys if you happen to know Blackburn). That’s more than double the price in the shops round here and leaves a bitter taste in your mouth before you even taste the beer; it wasn’t even pulled from a cask, for Christ’s sake.

I went for XB because of the label, to be honest. I don’t like hoppy beers with food and judging by the label I pictured this being a big bastard of a beer with really strong flavours to live up to the food. Medium malty beers don’t work for me either – I always find the only ones that work are dark beers that punch above their weight. Picture what I had on Monday, a Lancashire cheese sandwich, with a flowery beer – does that seem to match up for you? Perhaps it does, taste being individual of course, but for me cheese works best with something sharp and biting, full of its own flavours rather than just a compliment to food.

XB does, I must say, work well in these situations. The flavour is intense and lingers even while eating. It lasts just around the right time to match an easy-paced dinner break, so a fifth or so will be left for you to finish off when the food’s out of the way. I wouldn’t call it a great beer if I was out drinking – its strength and potency make it a slow one to get down and it’s definitely more suited to a casual dinner hour. However, on the occassional evenings where I knock together a few cheeses, breads and fruits and fancy a couple of beers to go with it, I’d definitely give XB another go.

Additional note: this would be a very efficient beer for getting banjoed in a short space of time.

Beers · Blackburn · Blakeys · Theakston · XB

Tomorrow is Wordy’s birthday, a day which I like to think of as a walking trip. That there happen to be about 28 pubs on the route we take is just by the by.

For 20 years or so now he’s done the Revidge Run, a pub crawl in Blackburn that goes right from the northern edge of the town into the centre – that is, for the few who make it to the end. I don’t think I ever have, usually tapping out somewhere around the Hole i’th Wall. Out of curiosity I knocked a Gmap together…

You can see it in full size over on Google Maps. Not bad eh?

Beers · Blackburn · Brownhill Arms · Bull's Head · Charles Napier · Hole I'th Wall · Knowles Arms · map · pub crawl · Revidge Run · Rising Sun · Royal Oak · Sportsman's Arms · Wilpshire Hotel

The Malt has had a chequered recent history, feeling to be in decline for the last decade. I caught the very tail end of its busy years at the end of the 90s, when there’d be a decent dinnertime crowd and a queue for the bar at weekends. Both of these are fast-fading memories. Stephen Hughes of the Blackburn & District Pubs (Past & Present) Facebook group reported that barrelage fell from 238 in 2004 down to 102 for 2007, where less than 150 barrels a year is seen as a bad sign. It isn’t just the Malt that’s suffered in this way, of course – much of the rest of Blackburn town centre has gone down the same road and it creates a kind of gravity effect with the combined pull of mass decline dragging individual pubs that try to break free down with it.

The subject of the town centre is something I don’t mean to go into here, though, as there are many things to consider about that which need more attention. Returning to the Malt, it appears it may be re-opening soon as it has been removed from Fleurets. It was listed on there for £175,000 which many agree was a good price. It has either been sold or withdrawn for unknown reasons, so we can only hope it’s the former and will be re-opening soon.

The Malt as it stood in 2009. Photo courtesy of Robert Wade on the Blackburn & District Pubs (Past & Present) Facebook group.

I’ve talked with many people about this particular pub and it seems something of a quandary. Everything feels like it adds up to a great pub:

• the central location near college and the office side of town,
• it sits in the middle of the run across town (roughly a line from the Postal Order to O’Neills),
• it’s a decent sized building,
• people still have good memories to associate the place with…

…but in recent years it just hasn’t worked. I’ve noticed that in other nearby towns, the real ale pubs are busy but I just can’t imagine that kind of thing working here. There’s no real ale “community” in the town centre – Blackburn has somehow ended up being a desert for it and has no reputation to speak of, so you get the gravity effect again – one pub going it alone isn’t enough to get people down into town for.

Whatever happens to this place, I hope it works out.

Beers · Blackburn · Fleurets · Malt and Hops · The Malt · town centre

A frankly terrifying photo from the Lancashire Telegraph.

The demise of Blackburn and Accrington’s annual beer festivals means that at the moment, the nearest to home for me is the Pendle festival in Colne. This sounds close but it’s still about 40 minutes on the train so I could pretty much be in Manchester in the same time. Still, Colne muni is a decent venue and at least it’s one I can get to without having to leave early to get back, or end up staying over in a grotty B&B, staying out ’til 4am and coming home £130 poorer.

It’s interesting to wonder what happened to the other festivals in the area. My last memory of a Blackburn festival must be from around 2001, at a guess. I remember it was before Barbara Castle Way was extended through to connect with Montague Street, as after the festival I ended up wrestling with my mates on the field which used to be there and my neighbour nearly called the police because he thought we were in a fight. Suffice to say, ample amounts of 8% scrumpy were involved in that particular night. There was going to be a festival in 2009 at King Georges Hall but it was cancelled due to lack of sponsorship.

Somewhere at home I have a t-shirt from the last Accrington festival which judging by this report was in 2004. My memories of that one are good – it was upstairs in the town hall, quite a big room and with a balcony overlooking the main road into the town. I’m not sure why that one ended but there’s been no word of another since, to the best of my knowledge.

In this part of the world we seem to have lost the bigger festivals in favour of smaller, more local ones. Take for example Clitheroe, which has had one for the last few years at the tiny St Mary’s Centre in May. There doesn’t seem to be any word yet whether they’ll be doing one this year, but I’m hopeful as last year’s was a good day out. The Aspinall Arms also hosts the Middle Earth beer festival, which I fully intend to get to this year; it’s quite a remote location but easily done if I can get a few people together.

It would be easy to worry about why the bigger festivals have died off around here, but I think there are particular circumstances in each case and they’re not part of a larger trend. The fact that smaller ones have thrived in their absence should, I think, just be appreciated.

Accrington · Aspinall Arms · Beer festival · Beers · Blackburn · Clitheroe · Colne · Middle Earth · Pendle · St Mary's Centre