Fumus Interruptus

I was delighted and deeply saddened by a note from dear Alan Hay, for which I express my gratitude, that said that there were only twelve customers at the Heart last Saturday night. Delighted that I'm not subject to the appalling fascism meted out to our fellow subjects, and saddened that, England has been disgorged.

I am, of course, still harping on about the smoking ban in English pubs but also it's ramifications. Rich you might say coming from me, living in the land where it is positively encouraged throughout. But I feel my comrades' anguish even here.

It is trite, but born from the experience of professionally touring international licensed premises, that the culture, the phenomenon of the English public house is unique in this world despite this ludicrous ban.

Nowhere else was there a place of such simultaneous discourse and revelry and a bastion of bawdiness and louche behaviour dressed in the stained velvet and crinoline of a genteel Victorian parlour. Where the formulation of all kinds of relationships -- romantic and social, of great import or frivolous -- was so potential. It's where some of my most cherished friendships were fomented. It was a monument to solitude and community. The most immediate point of sale for government policy and the place to immediately discuss it. It's a place of learning, not least providing a valuable lesson on how to expediently and expertly detect bullshit. A meeting place, a rallying point, and a safe haven. Where else can you derive hilarity and moments of tenderness? To console and be consoled? And, frankly, to get utterly pissed.

To drink anywhere else in the world is to merely enter into a dishonest financial transaction with the barman, not a landlord. A landlord, my God. A common peer of his own realm.

In America a bar is where you get drunk, alone; in France a bar is where only discourse seems to occur; Spanish bars may have food but the ankle-deep Ducados butts and discarded lotto tickets don't whet my appetite; I wouldn't give a XXXX to burn the Midnight Oil in an Australian pub; From the outside Scottish bars seem derelict or closed; Irish pubs look like Irish pubs the world over; great beer is found in German kellers but martial drinking jangles my nerves; Italy has no idea what constitutes a serious drinking establishment; and in Istanbul a bar is where one spends most of one's time trying to remain sober enough to calculate how much formaldehyde you drank at the end of the night without seeming tight.

And what glorious variety grows from what was once just a private house brewing their own gut-rot. From the sparkling gin palace to the thatched inn. From the city spit-and-sawdust to the Utopian 1930s wayside hostelry (automobiles welcome), the coach house, the new pub in the tower block estate, the wine bar (surely what made Gordon's beside Charring Cross so great was the ploughman's, suffocating smoke, and not enough headroom to stand up), and the common-or-garden boozer with a good Jukebox and migraine beer. I love the pub; I miss it bitterly.

And now all it's gone, forever. I wish my diarrhea would go the same way.