‘This is new,’ said my inner monologue. I was approaching a pub I’d been to loads of times before. Only this time, instead of strolling in, hands casually in pockets, I was met with the signs - the new, laminated, bold-print instructions on safely using the Fox and Hounds.
They’re very well organised. A one-way system around the garden, well-spaced tables with large umbrellas, menus and benches; table service with bar staff in posh black masks! Nobody goes to the bar any more; in Coronatown, in 2020, the bar comes to you.
Where was this when I was first figuring out the pub-queuing rules in the 1990s? That mystifying system we had of slowly nudging our way through a sea of tall people’s elbows, leaning confidently on the bar and trying to catch the barman’s eye... would not have been the frustrating puzzle it was had there been table service!
Gone would have been the days of seeing people who were behind you suddenly appear in front of you in the ‘queue’ and trying to figure out how they quantum-tunnelled past you! (And for a nation famed for our queues by the way, the pub is a belting anomaly that no-one ever talks about isn’t it! We queue for the bus simply, linearly, but the queue for the bar is a melee - either so advanced that it no longer looks like a queue at all, or so primitive that our quest for ‘getting served’ has somehow overwhelmed our traditional queue-logic completely and turned us into a sprawl.)
Anyway that was the old way. No more clutching a tenner in a sweaty palm while you’re being shunted about by the crowd, all angling to rest a victorious hand on the wood, or a precious foot on the gold pipe that runs beneath.
And what about having to lean across, to shout your order into the raised eyebrow of the staff because the music’s enormous? I used to have to heave myself up on my elbows, over the bar like a child, feet dangling and everything.
“Pint of coke, no ice,” I’d say. The bartender would cup his ears and mouth the word ‘what?’
I’d invariably end up with some purple concoction. At one particular pub in Bath, the cider I’d found I’d accidentally ordered (according the system) glowed in the dark.
Yeah all that’s different now. It’s civilised and simple. A man who looked like Zorro showed me to a garden table with a Kronenburg umbrella, and I ordered an orange juice. I didn’t go inside once the whole time. There he was with a pad and a pencil like a springer spaniel.
It’s sad I guess, going to places that used to feel freer. But for now we all get that it’s necessary. I do hope I get to live in a world where the old English pub is back to normal though, some day.
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