Peter Rhodes on hard-up pubs, a long trek to Devon and a close encounter between driver and cyclist
Now that Covid seems to be waning (fingers crossed), we are re-visiting some of the lovely old pubs we deserted during the pandemic. As we settled into the beer garden at one olde hostelry this week, we counted the years since we had last been there. Two, three, maybe?
We did the sums. It turned out we had not been there for 10 years. It was a reminder that pubs were losing customers by the thousand long before the virus arrived, and will continue to feel the pinch long after it is gone. The beer was excellent, the lunch okay, but I'm amazed, in these inflationary times, that any pub can recruit staff and provide even a basic level of cuisine.
Presumably, the more pubs that close, the more viable the survivors will be. This is based on that old and pretty much unproven theory “what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.”
At the next table in the beer garden was one of those pub irritants, the one-pint drunkard. A single glass of beer is all it takes to turn a normally calm person into a loudmouth. How nice to get so tipsy, so quickly, so cheaply.
If you've seen this week's much-viewed video of a car/bicycle incident in Sheffield, your verdict probably depends on whether you're a cyclist or a car driver.
Cyclists have been queuing in cyberspace to condemn the driver for pulling towards the oncoming bicycle. Drivers observe that the cyclist should have kept well to the left instead of pulling out to pass a parked vehicle. If I'd been the cyclist there would have been no incident because, as a born coward, I'd have been cycling along the wide (and apparently unused) footpath. There was blame on both sides in this incident yet the motorist was slapped in court with a £400 fine and five penalty points while the cyclist escaped any punishment. If that's fair I'm Bradley Wiggins.
Still on road use, after the traffic-jam horrors of the Easter holiday, a reader reminds me that jams have always been with us. He has grim memories of a trek to Devon in 1973. The journey took 11 hours, at an average speed of 13.7 mph. Are we nearly there yet...?