I over heard something in the first pub that made me ponder a bit though.

When I got there I was up at the bar and found that service was slow because there was only one person behind the bar.  Maybe we should have told them that we had a lot of people leaving today.  Anyway, a couple of middle-aged ladies came in and one said to the other “which side do you think the queue is?  Where is the end of the queue?”

Obviously they are not seasoned pub-goers because it struck me that there never is a queue in a pub: it is just a free-for-all.  How did that come about?   As a nation we have a well-deserved reputation for being inveterate queuers with an unwritten queue etiquette at least as complicated as the rules of cricket and yet inside pubs the concept of a queue does not exist outside of the toilets.

It is not so much a matter of who was there first as who shouts the loudest, has the sharpest elbows, catches the barman’s eye, waves their tenner the best or is most attractive/scary.  Behaviour that would cause a riot of tutting in the post office is standard behaviour at the bar.  Anywhere else in the country you would never stand waiting to be served while one newcomer after another gets their order in before you.  I wonder how that became the norm in pubs?

• Temperatures
• Pressure
• Consumer resistance

I can’t believe that nobody has thought of it so either it is technically not possible or there is a marketing decision that nobody would want to buy it.  Do any of my more alcoholic visitors have any ideas or opinions?

I am a few working days away from having been at the new company for two years.  In that time I have not had a single day off sick – not even when I went into hospital at two in the morning on a Thursday night, and it would be good to actually reach the arbitrary two-year mark.  On the other hand I do feel like crap with a sore throat, temperature, dizzyness, etc. and I wonder if I going into work for the last there days will mean I keep the symptoms for Christmas. Again.

When I slept most of Saturday I thought it was just a reaction to going out for four nights in a row, including two trips to London and more than my normal amount of alcohol.  By now I think I can stop blaming it on the maotai.

Its not all bad though.  After West Ham were robbed by Villa yesterday we were saved the ignominy of dropping into the bottom three when Man City lost, and because Spurs lost too we stay on the same points as them.  Some small consolation.

Just in case it all takes a turn for the worse I went out today to get Jayne’s presents instead of waiting until Christmas Eve as per normal.

I like beer and I like chocolate but a combination of the two does nothing to tempt me.  I like leeks and I like trifle, but that doesn’t mean that I would be queueing up for leek trifle.  What next?  Bacon & egg ice cream?

The Intrepid Fox was always an amazing place, full of all sorts of rockers, punks and goths plus a few suited office workers having a quick pint on the way home. The interior was plastered with assorted posters for records and concerts and the music was a bit more ‘real; than the average pub jukebox. Back in the 80s a few of my friends were goths and they introduced me to the place. Long after they had all moved away from London I was still going there from time to time.

There are various reasons given for the decline in the pub trade. The most plausible seem to be increasing rent and other overheads and the absurd cheapness of supermarket beer. A good point: when a pint costs £2.50 or 58p in a supermarket, plenty of people will choose a take-out over an evening out. The smoking ban is also cited. Although a lot of people are tempted to go out to pubs more now that they are not smoke-filled, the Intrepid Fox was the sort of place suited to smokiness.

A few pages later there was an increasingly rare example of good news: Eurotunnel have announced their first ever profit and expect to be offering dividends next year.

I’m sure there is no connection at all between those two stories although… alcohol prices in supermarkets are extraordinarily cheap and it has been suggested that many offers are actually loss-making marketing ploys to get people through their doors, and the cheapness of drink must surely have an impact on the binge-drinking and underage drinking problems. If, somehow, prices were raised so they were not so cheap relative to pub prices I do wonder if we would see fewer pubs closing or higher profits for Eurotunnel.

Having a drinks licence suspended for 28 days might sound a bit lenient, and really it should have been 90 days, but it must represent a substantial revenue: enough even for a company like Tesco to notice in their smaller shops and certainly enough to make smaller off licences decide that flogging booze to kids isn’t worth the risk.

Of course it was. Everyone was still in the pub! I was half-expecting to see crowds of bleary-eyed sots crawling out of the pubs this morning to go straight into work after spending 48 hours solid propping up the bar.

It was all a bit of an anti-climax really, which is more or less what I was half expecting and half hoping for. Although not a great drinker myself, I can remember times when I was working in Holland that I would go out for a meal at 10pm then decide to go into a bar afterwards for a biertje or zwei. It was good to not feel rushed about it all.

Some places here don’t really seem to have a clue about continental style grown-up drinking. A colleague told me he found several places open but refusing to let anyone new in after 11pm, which seems a bit pointless.

There are a few places which I suspect will adjust well to the new licensing regime and take the ability to open all hours in their stride – Brixton and Brighton for example. But they already have a lively after hours scene to start with. Coming out of a late concert this year I walked and drove through Brixton some time after 2am and the place was livelier than Crawley at 10pm. I even got stuck in a traffic jam on Brixton Hill!

Its a shame I don’t particularly enjoy drinking much now, what with living halfway between Brixton and Brighton…

What is up with the Tories these days? Aren’t they always talking about being the party of individual freedoms and choice? Aren’t they always complaining about the so-called nanny state and saying that the market should dictate everything? I would have thought that removing restrictions on licencing would be the sort of thing they would approve of.

The main plank of their argument seems to be that it is police advice that longer opening hours will lead to more trouble. Only last week the police advised that they needed 90 to detain suspects without trial but every single Tory in the House (except for Tapsell) decided to totally ignore that advice while again voting against something which is, or should be, more in line with their policies than ours.

They are interpreting the role of the opposition as being to oppose anything they might agree with if they think they have a chance of winning the vote. As such their priorities are purely around whether they win a vote in Parliament, with no thought about what any implications might be outside. I shouldn’t complain though: their blatant bandwagon-jumping did manage to prevent a very bad piece of legislation last week.

Maybe its just something being in Westminster does to you, and our lot are just as bad, but I would like to think we are better than that.

I would have a bit more respect for the Tory MPs if I thought that the bars in Parliament all closed up at 11:00pm on the dot, but I suspect that is not the case. I suspect that they can justify later hours there by saying they need a drink after a late sitting, while denying shift workers the same luxury.

I can’t get really worked up about the whole thing though. I hardly ever drink myself – typically one pint twice a month when I go to the Labour Club for a meeting – but just sometimes I fancy a quick pint after going to a show and find everywhere closing as I come out. I don’t want to binge-drink, but sometimes fancy having one of my pints at midnight instead of 7pm.