Last night was spent in this ye olde pub. Lit by gaslight. If you were in town, on the pull, and a bit of a vulgar lad, you would check out the good looking ladies and say loudly, crassly and confidently, "Mmm. Fanny by gaslight". Because it's dark, it would be an easy mistake to make. It wouldn't be until your eyes had enjoyed a period of adjustment that you would become aware that the place is frequented by old, portly men with red noses. Real drinkers. Real men. They don't take to strangers kindly. Oh no. I met an actor friend in there. He spent a good five minutes crawling around the floor underneath the cigarette machine, trying to find a pound he'd dropped. Nobody blinked at this comedy routine, so they must be used to people crawling on their hands and knees in there. It was, for inexplicable reasons, an evening for all and sundry to chat about sitcoms. We got on to a discussion about the late, great Leonard Rossiter, and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and Rising Damp. But, on those regular sortees to the bar, I heard a bunch of other folks deconstructing Hancock's Half Hour's The Blood Donor (tho they repeated "A pint! Why, that's nearly an armful!" a bit too much) while actor friend heard another bunch doing similar things with Fawlty Towers. Very weird. Must be Sam Smith's yeasty cheap beer that does it.
Time was when a man getting in from the pub would have burned the house down frying chips. Now, the drinker returns, ignites the PC and whacks 30 more songs onto the mp3 player. Should I be ashamed that one of them was Alicia Keys? Drink does funny things to a man.
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