<!– @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } –>

…they just vacate their bar stools!

Sitting down at the bar in a pub recently, I couldn’t help but notice the elderly gentleman at the other end, staring at me a touch reproachfully.

After a little while of being made to feel ever so slightly uncomfortable about sipping my beer, I asked if everything was okay. “That’s Bill’s seat,” he said quietly. “You’re sitting in Bill’s seat and he’s been sitting there since he was fourteen years old.”

We all know the type. I even have a couple who still use my pub who are similar. The gentlemen who you can set your watch by, who sit in the same seat and who drink, regardless of price or alternative options, the same beer, day after day. These are the guys who keep you going through the winter, the guys who can make you smile and frustrate you at the same time.

These are the Waldorf and Statlers of the pub world.

Apologising, I got up to move, knowing just how important these set seats and personal pint glasses are, but the barmaid stopped me. Poor old Bill had passed away, the other chap simply wasn’t ready to see somebody else using his friend’s seat just yet.

Sitting, talking with the barmaid and the other gentlemen, I couldn’t help thinking how things are changing in pubs all the time. We face so many hurdles every day, from taxes and increased competition to the omnipresent smoking ban, yet another problem is slowly facing us too – especially the smaller village locals: the older generation, the epitomist pub goers, are slowly passing on to the barstool in the sky.

And nobody is being taught to sit in their place.

Bill had been going to that pub since he was fourteen years old. Most of us are, or know of, the type of people who can recall their first pints in a small local somewhere, long before we were legally allowed to do so. You wouldn’t think of doing it now, such is the vehement opposition to alcohol in many quarters, and the punishments are so strict that bar staff, landlords, and even the drinkers themselves are at risk of heavy fines and the possible loss of their livelihoods.

But as we grow older, we’re not teaching the next generation of drinkers to appreciate the Great British Pub for what it is. The younger generation, the next set of drinkers, aren’t as bothered about the smoking ban as we are – they’re growing up with the public opposition to smoking whereas most of us grew up with stale smoke hanging in the air all around us – and the cost of a pint can’t be too much of a concern to them either (I’ll come back to that).

The FaceSpace Generation, however, find it more fun to spend their time (and their beer money) on their computers and their Microsoft PlayStations, chatting with their friends via Internet social networking pages rather than over a well-poured pint of good old British bitter.

And when they do choose to go out into the great wide world for a beer, they move swiftly from the cheapness of the supermarket to the expense of the nightclub, where a pint can set you back over £4 and a jug of Vodka Red Bull will literally empty your wallet. The pub, that integral part of social networking, that after-work meeting place or the first (second, third, fourth) stop on a night of enjoyable socialising, doesn’t seem to get as much of a look in any more.

When they drink, they drink copiously, swallowing gallons of lager like it’s lemonade and then stepping outside to punch a taxi driver before vomiting all over the shoes of a passing police officer. Or so certain members of the media would have us believe, anyway.

They aren’t being taught to sup their pint in a nice pub while having a chat and a laugh with their mates. They aren’t being taught how to handle alcohol or how to meet real people in real places. Instead, they’re being left to socialise in the virtual world in front of a screen that is keeping opticians in business, and then going out and drinking uncontrollably on a Saturday night.

If we want pubs to survive, perhaps the older of us should start teaching the younger the ways of the pub. Say yes, Yoda…

- – - -

Amazingly, this is my first opportunity to write about The Publican Awards – it’s incredible to think that, already, two weeks have past since that fantastic night. My wife and I had a great time, and it was wonderful to meet up with other members of The Publican team, fellow bloggers such as Chris Maclean, and other landlords and ladies, many of which were up for an award or two.

The one thing that stood out for me, however, was the level of positivity that surrounded everybody. Our trade gets a huge amount of negative press at the moment, is blamed (often erroneously) for encouraging binge drinking, and suffers at the mercy of stories touting supermarkets and the smoking ban as harbingers of death for the Public House.

Yet here were people making it work in a time of difficulty. The hard work and dedication of these people made me proud to be part of the industry, and it also made me realise that if we can keep it up then in nine years time, when my eldest son becomes legally old enough to drink alcohol in public, there’ll still be pubs (as well as my own) for me to take him to and teach him how to socialise properly.

If you’ve been frustrated by the lack of progress in updating this blog, then so have I – and I apologise.  The trouble is, when I set this blog up I was dabbling with several different blog solutions but in the end I’ve decided to stick with the one that has been in place the longest.

My original blog – http://blog.markjdaniels.com – has been established for some time now and gets updated more frequently than anything else.  It’s a random babble of views on daily life, notes of interest from news articles that have caught my attention, and the opportunity to rant & rave when the emotion takes me.  So if You’ve liked the few snippets I’ve put up on here in the past, please reset your bookmarks and RSS feeds to the original blog at http://blog.markjdaniels.com/ 

Also, if you’re in the pub/alcohol industry you can see my blog on the trade magazine The Publican website – http://www.thepublican.com/blogs 

Thanks for reading

Fond as I often appear to be of finding something to whinge about, I actually prefer good news and I’ve been desperately looking for something positive to write about. Sadly, these days – for the pub trade at least – it’s a damned near impossible thing to do.

What with the credit crunch, bad weather, punitive Sky prices, rising utility bills, small wine glass measures, industry redundancies, tied tenancies, Big Brother and the fact that Global Warming causes kidney stones it’s no wonder we’re all feeling a bit despondent. And a couple of quarters of negativity, we’re told, will lead to a recession.

So it was nice to find a little ray of sunshine this weekend that might make Britain’s publicans – and pub goers – smile a little. And I’m not talking about the first decent ray of sunshine, either, which brought customers flocking to our beer gardens, but a report commissioned by Pimm’s that showed this nation’s top ten favourite summertime noises.

Seagulls cawing and pigeons cooing might have some of us reaching for the shotgun, but in seventh and eighth places respectively they did manage to shove the sound of clinking glasses in to a somewhat dismal ninth place; however, they were beaten in sixth place by the sound of drinks being poured over ice. People playing tennis managed fifth whilst the sound of a cricket ball hitting a bat is apparently Britain’s fourth favourite sound of summer.

Waves on a beach is in third place but the pub trade should rejoice because, despite all the stories of neighbours complaining about the volume of people sitting outside and the fact that the smoking ban has driven most of them there, the second favourite noise of the summer is that of people chatting in a pub beer garden.

It was beaten in to second place only by the one sound we all find synonymous with this time of year: a lawnmower cutting grass.

Despite my best efforts, however, I could not find the snap of a bikini being undone anywhere on the list and the top ten does go to show that you can’t keep a good Briton’s despondency down for too long: the final sound, to complete the round-up in tenth place, is rain.

1. Lawnmower cutting grass
2. Pub garden chatter
3. Waves on a beach
4. A cricket ball hitting a bat
5. People playing tennis
6. Drinks poured over ice
7. Seagulls cawing
8. Pigeons cooing
9. Clinking glasses
10. Rain

I’m really looking forward to my trip to the British Motorshow next week. It’s my bi-annual sojourn to the Excel centre in London with a friend and my eight-year-old son, where we can drool over exotic pieces of automotive pornography, raise incredulous eyebrows at the barking shape of Japanese Manga-style concept cars, tut wisely at the unimaginative design of Mazda’s next range of cars and secretly keep one eye on all the girls that adorn each manufacturer’s stand.

Of course, there’s always the entertainment too: the off-road centre, the general atmosphere, the worry that my boy will probably ask – really loudly – if the bus we use to get to the centre is the one that was blown up a few years back as he did the last time we visited, and the launch of new, weird and wacky cars to look forward to.

And one of the cars I’m curious to look at is the Lightning GT. Amidst a load of news stories announcing that Global Warming gives you kidney stones, the Lightning Car Company unveiled an electric supercar apparently capable of surpassing the performance of many leading players in the field. It will have a range of approximately two hundred miles after only ten minutes of recharging and uses Star Trek style nano-technology to make it all work.

The company is already taking orders for deliveries next year and promises that its Hi-Pa Drive and NanoSafe batteries do not compromise either the integrity or soul of a supercar, allowing both weight-distribution and performance to be equal to that of many petrol-powered rivals. They estimate that the car will produce the equivalent of more than 700bhp from its electric drive and that it will beat a Jaguar 4.2 XKR Convertible in the 0-60mph dash, whilst simultaneously being even cleaner and cheaper to run than Toyota’s much-heralded Prius.

Indeed, the car’s green credentials lend it to being exempt from London’s Congestion Charge scheme and any road tax whatsoever, whilst the simple construction of the Hi-Pa Drive and NanoSafe batteries mean that ongoing maintenance is minimal. The estimated cost per mile is just 2.2pence, which the Lightning Car Company estimated will save an owner over £17’000 per year compared to the direct competition.

Specification isn’t compromised, either. According to the company’s website, the Lightning GT will come equipped with every gizmo you could possibly want on a luxury car and even includes Air Conditioning, something that hybrid masters Toyota have struggled to make work successfully without starting a petrol engine. I just hope that it has a dashboard to rival Knight Rider.

But the big problem for me with this car is the noise that it will make. Supercars are supposed to be brash and loud. They are the epitome of decadence and, when you put your foot down, the noise they make is supposed to tell everybody around that you were brave enough to sleep with Satan’s whore.

If you have a Lamborghini in white or black you are deemed boring; it needs to be Lime Green and it shouts that you own Essex and three footballers. A Bugatti makes more noise than the moon crashing in to the sun and a Ferrari tells everybody that you’ve just finished shagging Abi Titmuss and her best mate on your yacht in the Mediterranean.

The silent wheeze of the Lightning GT as it whistles by you quieter than the wind will tell everybody that you are still a fan of Automan.

I’m not a lover of Global Warming theorists and don’t believe that all our trees are about to stop spewing oxygen into the atmosphere and I am a huge fan of cars, but equally I do think that if we can build nice friendly cars that don’t cause my kids to have asthma and won’t require the budget of Portugal to run them each week, then electric cars might just be the way forward.

So why are companies like LCC and Tesla building supercars? Only Leonardo DiCaprio will want one and they are utterly impractical to Kerry Katona and her brood when she’s doing the weekly trip to Iceland.

Supercars should be left to the rich, famous and Jeremy Clarkson. If somebody has got the technology that can make a car drive from Cambridge to Manchester for less than a fiver then put it in a nice family four-door saloon and price it reasonably.

As long as it doesn’t need a three-phase electricity supply to charge it, everyone will buy it. Even me.

Have you ever wondered how they choose the people that are going to appear on Channel 4’s house-buying programme Location Location Location?

I appreciate that they are going to choose those who will make a much more entertaining programme than somebody who’s happy with a three-bed semi on a council estate, but you do have to marvel sometimes at the lunacy and snobbery of some of those that appear on the show. From the wondrously entertaining who are hoping Phil and Kirsty will be able to get them a three bedroom apartment in central London on a budget of just £150’000 to the pernickety couple with a budget of £1’000’000 who still wouldn’t be satisfied if Posh & Becks gave them one of their houses and threw in an Aston Martin to clinch the deal, it can make for some whoppingly entertaining TV viewing on a subject that is unadulteratingly boring.

And then you get the couples who have a budget of several million pounds, have been searching for four years and have viewed eight thousand houses, yet haven’t managed to find one they like. Or the couples whose views on what their house should be like are so poles apart that one of them might just as well move to Australia; it’s a wonder their marriages have survived as long as some of them have.

On top of that, you’ve got the guys who like to boast to Phil that they’re not shy of doing a bit of work and then gulp in panic when he shows them a house with magnolia walls, and heaven forbid that Kirsty might suggest they could knock a wall down between the kitchen and the living room. Or you have the women who fall in love with the chocolate box thatched cottage with a little brook running through the garden, but their husbands are just not getting an emotional attachment to the house. They’re just not feeling it.

“I’ve tried everything,” the desperate women will wail. “I’ve tried pleading and crying and I’ve even told him he can have the widescreen television and a PlayStation 3.” I’m waiting for the day Kirsty turns round and asks if they’ve tried swallowing.

It’s amazing that Phil Spencer and Kirsty Allsop haven’t actually punched any of their clients in the face, very hard.

Honestly, my wife and I would make boring television for them. We’d give them our budget, tell them we’d like four bedrooms and space for two cars on the driveway and preferably it should be near a nice pub and the children’s school, and then we’d walk in to the first house they showed us and say “bugger me, offer them the asking price!”

But it wouldn’t work like that for me because I have been the unluckiest man on the planet when it comes to the property market. I bought my first flat for a measly £19’000 when I was 21 years old and sold it in 1997 for not very much more so that I could move to Cambridgeshire to start a new career in the Internet. Since then, I have been chasing the property market, never quite able to catch up with the rising demands of escalating house prices.

The last time I tried to buy a house was in 2005, when I found a three-bed semi-detached property on the outskirts of a nice little Cambridgeshire village. It stretched our budget but would have meant that we owned our own house – and then I discovered it had got a septic tank, which the vendor hadn’t cleaned out in over eight years because it was leaking.

Querying why the houses he owned on either side of it had been connected to mains sewerage but this one I was buying hadn’t seemed to ruffle his feathers further and, when I asked him to get the septic tank repaired before I finalised the purchase or, at least, discount the house enough for me to do it, he backed out of the sale.

And so, in a freak moment of frustration seeking solace in a pint in my local village pub, the then-landlord told me he was selling up. Kirsty and Phil couldn’t have had a better opportunity fall in their laps in the closing moments to make their show any more tense and exciting.

Within two weeks we’d signed and sealed the paperwork and today is three years to the day since we took over the pub.

It feels like a lifetime but, despite economic gloom, global warming, rising utility prices, the smoking ban and Alistair Darling, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

As the price of petrol gets higher and higher the threat of disruptive action grows heavier and heavier and, today, TransAction 2007 is reportedly arranging for a convoy of trucks to descend on London to deliver a coffin symbolising the death of the haulage industry to Number 10.

Diesel prices are 30% higher than they were a year ago and that, along with strike action at fuel depots, means that many people are starting to panic purchase their petrol. One forecourt local to me even ran out of unleaded yesterday and this prompted me to join the ranks of panic buyers and go in search of some fuel.

The Jeep still had a quarter of a tank of unleaded in it, but it uses that just to drive out of the car park, and even though we can go several days without using the car I decided it was probably best to potter out whilst most people are in their offices and top it to the brim. I even chucked a couple of 5-litre cans in to the boot – for the lawnmower, obviously.

Finding a petrol station that still had unleaded was surprisingly easy. Clearly, a fuel shortage hasn’t hit us yet, but because the newspapers say it’s going to there were a few cars on the forecourt of Soham’s BP station, and I wasn’t the only one who had decided to fill up a couple of spare cans as well as my car’s tank.

At £1.12 a litre (that equates to an eye-watering $10.02 US Dollars per gallon, Mr America) it wasn’t the cheapest petrol station around, but at least there weren’t queues down the high street waiting to use it and I hadn’t had to drive around and around burning off fuel in search of an available unleaded pump.

As the miserable April showers clattered on the corrugated roof I filled the Jeep and my two cans up and watched men in all sorts of cars doing the same around me, all hoping we’ve stolen a march on any potential fuel disaster and all praying that it won’t be as bad as the press is saying it might be. I rounded the pump off to a credit card crumbling £80.00 and sauntered in to pay.

“Number seven or eight,” I told the attendant as I got to the front of the queue. I couldn’t see which pump number my car was alongside. “It’s the one that’s at eighty quid.”

“Certainly, sir,” the attendant said. He took my credit card, pushed it in to the keypad and got me to type in my PIN. Within a second the payment had cleared, he handed me the slip and I was walking away when I suddenly realised that I needed a VAT receipt for the accountant.

“Sorry, mate,” I said, stepping back. “Can I have a VAT receipt please?”

He nodded, idly tapping some keys, and produced a slip of paper which he handed to me. I was about to walk away when I realised he’d made a mistake. “Sorry again,” I said, trying to be polite and not at all annoying. “I think you’ve given me the wrong receipt. This one says £46.21.”

“Bugger,” the attendant hissed. “It’s the right receipt, that’s the second time today I’ve done that. Sorry, chap, but I better charge you the difference then…”

There comes a time in your life when you realise that you are getting older and have to accept that you aren’t, in fact, immortal or destined to look as svelte as Brad Pitt for the remainder of your days.

My best friend and I often lament the passing of our years over cold pints of lager or snippets of telephone conversations when we get the chance. He’s a policeman, I’m a publican and ten years ago I could have hoisted kilns and kegs left right and centre without thinking about it, whilst he could probably have apprehended Ming the Merciless and all his henchmen single-handedly.

Today, I get uncomfortable twinges when I lift a firkin and kilns are beginning to seem beyond the realms of possibility, whilst he sits in his patrol car bemoaning the arrival of middle-age spread. On Saturday I did a bar in a local hall for our cricket club’s annual meal; when I first started doing these bars they were easy – today, I’m still aching from the event.

Yet, like many of us, I still desperately cling on to the tendrils of my youth whilst trying to ignore the fact that I now have to get up three times a night for a pee. Nights out with my mates, though few and far between, involve lager and kebabs because none of us want to admit that a quiet night at home with a cup of tea after the kids have gone to bed is actually more appealing.

And neither do we want to admit that we’d much rather, these days, like to sit in a quiet pub reminiscing about the old days over a well-served pint of beer because, surely, that means we’re getting older. Bitter, we were told in our younger days, is for your dad, or that strange bloke down the street with a beard. If I’d walked in to a pub when I was eighteen and asked for a pint of bitter my mates would probably have laughed me out of town over the top of their fizzing glasses of lager. So I’ve never really got in to the stuff and always shied away from it when I’ve been out socialising.

Sure, I know what a good pint of bitter should look like, I vent and tap away at several barrels a week and make sure the beer is top quality before it goes on the pump. I taste every one of the beers before they’re put on to serve and can definitely tell the difference between a well-prepared bitter and a glass of vinegar, and I’ve noticed over recent months that my lager sales have dropped whilst my bitter sales have, in this lean time, stayed the same if not risen slightly. A group of twenty-somethings even ordered a round of four pints of bitter from me the other day, yet I’ve never developed a hankering for the stuff.

Until last week, that is. Enjoying the opportunity to get for a bite to eat on our own, my wife and I found ourselves at a beautiful riverside pub in Ely, where I was faced with an array of mind-boggling lagers, some of which I thought were only available in Indian restaurants. I wasn’t attracted to any of them but, worryingly, their range of bitters stood out like a glowing beacon.

Steeling myself, I made my choice and ordered a Cajun Chicken baguette to accompany it, before we headed out to sit by the river on a gloriously sunny early April afternoon. “This is really good,” I commented to my wife, referring to the beer, which was going down quicker and smoother than Abi Titmuss. When my sandwich arrived – on brown bread, no less – a thought occurred to me: I’m starting to grow up, and I’m actually quite enjoying it. The midnight trips to the toilet, the estate car on the driveway, and now a wholesome pint of bitter in my hands.

There was only one thing worrying me: it’s my birthday today. And I’m only 36.

Many pub companies, small and large, are currently looking at ways of making their establishments more environmentally friendly and, as more and more outlets look to “go green”, it’s clear that this hot topic is set to linger for a while longer.

Indeed, a tabloid newspaper has announced this week that beer prices could rise dramatically as climate change affects the production of a key grain needed to brew beer, with environmental changes in New Zealand and Australia possibly causing a decline in the production of malting barley.

I’ve long believed that there are two very distinct components to the whole issue of the environment, however: climate change, which is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and global warming, which appears to be a government taxation policy. You only have to look at tax on motorists to understand what I mean.

I drive a 2000 model Jeep Grand Cherokee with a 4.0 litre petrol engine that is neither economical nor politically correct in today’s environment, yet because of its age it is actually cheaper to tax this vehicle than its modern day contemporaries, many of which are probably far cleaner. I don’t drive this vehicle because I want to be some form of motoring anarchist, however, but because it is hugely practical for cash and carry runs, versatile enough to take the kids and their paraphernalia of outdoor activity equipment pretty much anywhere, and supremely luxurious for taking the wife out on a rare evening off. I love it to bits and it’s virtually bomb-proof, yet I know I should change it for something a little bit greener. The trouble is, anything newer and greener will cost more to tax and, because of the rampage on vehicles of this type, it is now utterly worthless. I can’t afford to get rid of it, and because of that I’m not going to.

This doesn’t mean I won’t do my bit to help the environment, however. We used to use the car to take the kids to school every day and do two, if not three, runs to the cash and carry each week as business dictated. I would even shove the tubs of empty glass bottles in to the boot and drive the short distance to the bottle bank to dispose of them, but I no longer do many of these things. Today, the kids catch the bus to and from school every day, and instead of using big plastic tubs I bought a wheelie-bin from a local DIY store and now trudge up the road to the bottle bank with it when it’s full. With the MP3 player blaring in my ears, it’s actually quite a cathartic trip.

My wife and I shopped around for the best deal with suppliers who deliver and even discovered that our nearest cash and carry offered a delivery service for orders over a certain value. Hooked on the need to make our little village pub as environmentally friendly as possible we even found a company who come along each week and take away our disused vegetable oil to turn it in to penguin-friendly bio-diesel.

Suddenly, we seem to be saving a small fortune in petrol and we aren’t wasting precious hours of family time racing back-and-forth between one supplier or another.

I have, however, just worked out that in place of using the Jeep most days, we now get six monstrously large, noxious delivery lorries arriving on our doorstep each week.

You have to love the irony of climate change.

The beleaguered pub trade needs some help. At the moment, apparently 54 pubs a month are closing (an average of 1.7-something a day) and the trade has an incredibly bad image thanks to just a handful of people. Here are some guidelines I would give the Chancellor if I could have just five minutes of his time:

1. Ban supermarkets and other off-trade premises such as garage forecourts from advertising the price of their alcohol. Fair enough, I’ll grant that you can’t govern the price they sell at or how they negotiate their buy-prices, but you can stop them from boasting about it. This would go a long way towards stopping minors and binge-drinkers from constantly being bombarded with cheap alcohol prices.
2. Change the age that people can buy alcohol from such off-trade establishments from. Anybody under the age of 21 cannot purchase alcohol from supermarkets, for example, although it would still be legal for 18-21 year olds to purchase from public houses. This would have the effect of helping the pub trade, it would allow those in that bracket to learn to be socially responsible and it would mean that people were drinking in a safe and managed environment, rather than encouraging the young to go and drink copious amounts at home before going out and spoiling the party for everybody else.
3. Alter the current tax system to lower the tax for beer sold on-trade. Keg/Cask beer – i.e. beer sold from a pump in a pub – for example, would be eligible to a lower rate of tax than that sold in a supermarket by the bottle. This would give the on-trade a reprieve from draconian taxation that they so desperately need right now and would encourage more people to use their local than drink in solitude at home.

Something similar’s been done for cigarettes in terms of advertising and the age of purchasing them. It’s only a thought, but it might just work…