Country pubs fail the B-test

YOUNG Farmer’s Night at the Red Lion was a gloomier affair than usual this week; among the young farmers (average age: 68) faces were long and silences ponderous.
Indeed, a poor night on which to introduce My Daughter the Actress’s putative in-laws to the kind of cheery welcome upon which one can normally count up here in Paradis sur Tweed. Doom was in the air: instead of beef and barley, the talk was of breathalysers.
Few doubt the wisdom of Sir Peter North’s government-commissioned report, which concluded that halving the legal limit of drivers’ blood alcohol would save another 160 lives per year. Most, however, foresee such a revision leading to the rapid demise of that great British institution, the country pub.
My immediate area has already lost one formerly thriving hostelry, despite the fact that it once offered hearty food round the clock, five B&B rooms for tourists and a booming drink-and-dominoes economy. It now stands closed and near-derelict, its swinging sign a notice board for tattered circus posters and its car park a magnet for rubbish.
Transport links after 6pm do not exist; it’s a case of drive to the nearest pub (four miles distant) or don’t go out. This is the way communities die. Tourism is fine in the summer but in winter driving to a pub for one drink seems pointless. And a country pub without patrons to fill its car park cannot survive.
The Byreman and I, close to Methodist in our approach to drink-driving, are confirmed car-sharers: he drives and stays ‘dry’ one night; I do the same on the other. But a more organised approach must be found.
Anyone care to run a Pub-Bus service two nights a week?

I HAVE watched football in some rum places but the last place I ever expected to view the World Cup was in the Grand Ballroom of the Royal Festival Hall in London’s posh cultural quarter, the South Bank.
Spilling wet-cheeked from a concert celebrating the life of the late Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle (mother of Rufus and Martha Wainwright and a diva in her own right), I was confronted by two enormous screens playing out the England-USA match to hundreds of lager-swilling culturistas who similarly stayed to drink and cheer.
Never again do I expect to witness a Mexican wave within that cultural cathedral’s hallowed halls, nor hear the massed choir chanting “Inn-gerr-land! Inn-gerr-land!”

ELFIN safety has gone doolally, as my friend Margaret the Do-It-Herselfer discovered the other day.
Needing a length of wooden dowel to complete a job she popped into the nearest hardware chain store – I won’t say which one, but you have to mind your Ps and Qs in there! – and bought a piece in the only length available which was, you might know, too long for her car.
“Would you just saw it in half?” she asked at the checkout?
“Sorry,” she was told by an assistant in one of the country’s biggest DIY tool shops. “We’re not allowed to use the tools . . . elfin safety!”
In the ensuing verbal kerfuffle the manager had to be summoned. He at least, bright chap, provided the solution . . . he simply snapped the wood in half.
And all the little elfins lived safely ever after!


GEORDIE philanthropists Brian and Shirley Burnie bade goodbye to their beloved Doxford Hall after donating all of the proceeds from the sale of what is now a fantastic hotel and spa to their new charity, Daft As a Brush Cancer Care.
A charity auction raised thousands more, no thanks to Yours Truly: my £75 top bid for a 1919 edition of a yellowing Daily Mail was trumped, would you believe, by the TV reporter who was covering the auction for BBC2’s The One Show.
Was I upset? Was I heck!
The Daily Mail was never worth £80, even on its best day.
First published in The Journal, Newcastle, July 18 2010