You're A Complete And Utter Mustard!

Living and bringing up children in a pub has meant that it’s not been outside of my expectations that, at some point, one of my boys would pick up on swear words.  After all, our regular trade is made up of lorry drivers, builders and farmers, most of whom don’t know how to string a sentence together without punctuating it with profanities.

It has never overly bothered me as all of my regulars will hold back on their swearing the moment they see the kids about or are asked to but, stepping in to Year 4 and rapidly heading towards his ninth birthday, it’s also true to say that Malachy will – by now – have learned one or two naughty words whilst running around the playground.

And indeed, I’m prone to the odd bit of potty-mouthedness myself, as well.  Shit, wank, bollocks and fuck (sorry, Nana) have all spilled from my tongue unchecked and at inopportune moments, usually when I’ve hit my thumb while tapping a barrel of IPA.  Once, on a journey somewhere, a motorist on the motorway cut me up, causing me to brake hard and forcing an expletive from my lips.  It was the c-word – one I rarely use but a word that was conjured up from nowhere in an effort to vent my frustration on the muppet who had chosen that moment to squeeze between me and the DHL lorry in front of me as the outside lane (which had been signed as closed for road works for the past three miles) narrowed to nothingness.

“What’s a c***, daddy?”  Malachy – who I guess would have been about four years old at the time – asked.

Ali looked at me from the passenger seat with raised eyebrows and then said, helpfully, “you’re on your own with that one.”

Since then, Malachy hasn’t really experimented with swear words.  He’s only recently been practicing with dropping the ‘dy’ and ‘my’ from Daddy and Mummy, and that’s still so alien to him that it came as a bit of a surprise to me when he got off the school bus this evening and, looking over his shoulder, called back to somebody: “yeah, you bastard!”

Naturally, this caught my attention, but I wasn’t sure what I’d heard.  It was only because the parents of his best friend were stood with me, and also heard this utterance, that I decided to pick him up on it.  “What did you just say?”  I demanded, in my best Angry Dad voice.

“Nothing,” he answered quickly.

“I just heard you say a rude word to somebody as you got off the bus.”

“No,” he cried defensively.  “I didn’t say anything rude.”  And then he thought about it for a second.  “I said mustard!”

His best friend leaned forward over his shoulder and said, “Yep, that’s what he said.  We were talking about foods we really don’t like.”

And with that, the conversation was over.  As adults, the three of us stood there looking at the eight year olds, beaten by their swiftness and resolute decision to back each other up to the hilt.

That, and the fact that Malachy probably thought I was a complete and utter mustard for trying to tell him off in front of his friends.

I've Never Seen Star Wars

For those of you not familiar with him, Marcus Brigstocke is a stand-up comedian most famously associated with the 6:30 comedy slot on BBC Radio 4 and the ironic Pac-Man Joke:

“If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.„


He's also the voice behind Radio 4's new show, I've Never Seen Star Wars, which basically takes celebrities and gets them to do things they've never done before.  It airs on Thursday nights at 6:30pm and last night's was the first show, which starred none other than my uncle, Paul Daniels.  Marcus got him to read a bit of feminist literature, go swimming, cook a meal and watch The Great Escape.

I missed it live but, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, you can listen again to it on BBC Radio's Listen Again service.  If you're interested, just click the link below.  I thought it was quite amusing, even if I do say so myself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00dkzls

Did The Railway Line Move For You?

If Wild West movies have taught me anything, it's that the Cowboys could tell when trains they wanted to rob were coming by simply feeling the vibrations through the track.  Apparently, they could probably work out how far away they were and even how long it might be before they arrived.

Which is why I’m sure it can’t have been much of a surprise to a couple who were having sex on a railway line in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa when a goods train came along and crushed them both. 

The railway bonk took place on Friday evening and the driver even attempted to alert them to his presence by shouting at them above the noise of his approaching train, but still the amorous couple continued with their business.

One can only hope that, just before the end, the man looked down at his moaning partner and exclaimed: “Darling, did the railway line just move for you too?”

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You can read the full story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7629433.stm

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Death To The Pub Sign

As a Health & Safety zealot in Wiltshire homes in on pub signs and declares them illegal because they might encourage people to drink and drive, my latest article on the Publican website picks up on the flaws in her argument and points out that before she can ban pub signs, she's going to have to ban petrol stations from selling alcohol first...

You can read the article by clicking here.

This Is Not The Knight Rider I Once Knew. It's Far Cooler...

It’s 1982 and it’s a Saturday night.  I’m ten years old, and my dad’s just brought home a brand new colour TV, complete with a remote control that uses sonic frequency to put the volume up and down and flick between the three TV channels we have access to.

It’s nineteen inches of television erotica and it’s ginormous.  It’s the most wonderful thing my dad has ever bought... and blasting on to the screen as I snuggle up on the sofa with him is KITT, a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am that can talk, jump, drive itself and, thanks to the immortal Turbo Boost, get to sixty in less than two seconds and race on to a giddy two hundred plus miles per hour.

And it was indestructible.

It also had ejector seats, a silent mode, and a version of Intellivision’s rubbish Auto Racing game on its built-in screens to depict other cars on the road that it was trying to catch.

KITT – the Knight Industries Two Thousand to the uninitiated amongst you – also had the coolest dashboard of any car and a steering wheel that’s shaped something like a Formula One car’s today.

Simply put, KITT was ace and, with the strobing red light in his bonnet grill, he frankly made my dad’s 1979 Citroen CX Estate look, well, crap.

I lived for Saturday nights and I looked forward to sitting down with my dad to watch Michael Knight and his trusty supercar beat the bad guys.  The show immortalised David Hasselhoff and his trademark chest wig and, as a ten-year-old, having to wait for the next episode to see if Goliath, the Heavy Goods Vehicle also coated with a Molecular Bonded Shell, really had destroyed KITT the week before or not was almost unbearable.  It was like waiting for Christmas Eve, only not quite as much fun.

In later episodes, and in a rather desperate attempt to win back waning viewers, KITT was equipped with a Super Pursuit Mode that made him go even faster and he was the first car to ever have a folding hard-top roof.  Mercedes Benz take note: NBC thought of it first when they tried to make their ageing Pontiac still look cool.

Eventually, Knight Rider came off the air and David Hasselhoff went on to run around a beach with semi-naked women and drink lots of alcohol, but skip forward to 2008, where we have Sky Plus, over 180 channels and fifty-inch Hi-Def TVs, and look what’s coming back to the small screen.

Malachy might be eight years old and just starting to develop a passion for Jeremy Clarkson and Lamborghinis, but he’s still not as excited as I am at seeing KITT dressed up as a Ford Mustang GT500 KR, with Val Kilmer as his voice...

Ejaculate For Your Airways

Ever since I was a child I’ve had sinus problems – you can usually find me sniffing and snuffling my way round the bar and I’m no stranger to Nasonex nasal spray.

At the age of seven I had my adenoids removed and, since then, I’ve been back and forth to the doctor trying to figure out why it is I simply cannot breathe properly through my nose.  My sense of smell has all but disappeared, apparently a symptom of anosmia, and the latest suggestion is that they should drill my nose out a bit to give me more room to breathe – a sort of re-bore of my sinuses that I can only liken to a rather crap modification I did to my old Austin Metro years ago.

I’ve apparently got lots of polyps on my mucous membranes and all sorts of other nosey issues that just really aren’t that pleasant to go in to right now, but my doc seems to find it all fascinating and he seems more than eager to get his scalpel and Black & Decker out and get to work on my nasal cavities.

And it’s got so bad recently that I was beginning to think about actually letting him get on with barrying up my nose.  That was until I read of a report by Sina Zarrintan that claims that there is a direct correlation between ejaculation and stimulation of adrenergic receptors in the refractory period immediately after sexual relief.  Apparently, stimulation of said receptors will provide relief from cold and other nasal-related symptoms.  Or, effectively, a good hard shag will blast your blockage clean out.

Zarrintan proposes that if men stuck to a rigid masturbation or sexual intercourse programme, they could effectively wank themselves free of the sniffles. 

Sadly, Zarrintan’s report doesn’t offer similar solutions for women who suffer from sinus troubles, but if you’re a lady jealous of this new found treatment for your hubby, let me put it to you this way: if he suffers from the nosey-snores at night, perhaps a good work out with him will help him clear out his airways just before he goes to sleep...

I must admit I’ve never considered how well I can breathe through my nose after glooping, but I’m open to trying anything to get relief from my perpetual nasal problems so I’m off to suggest to the missus that she aids me in my quest for proboscis perfection.

I’ll leave you with one final thought on the whole masturbatory matter: how many teenage boys do you see with sinus problems?

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Related articles:  The Guardian, Science Blog, Boing Boing

Yes, Officer, It Is An Emergency. I Have My Testicles Caught In My Zip.

“Hello, Finmere 254.” 

I can remember it as clearly as I can remember my newborn brother being brought home from the hospital, and realising that my life was to change irrevocably.  It’s one of those little memories that just springs from nowhere, but is as clear as my memory of sitting in the bar at four o’clock this afternoon playing MarioKart on the Wii.

I’m probably of the last generation that can remember using the location and just a three digit telephone number to identify where you had got through to.  Finmere 254 was our telephone number when I was a lad.  Since then, area codes and six digit telephone numbers (more, in some areas) have replaced the old village-plus-number connection and operators are all but obsolete, thanks to the Internet and 118 118.

Since then, British Telecom has confused the numbering system further as our demand for telecommunications have grown, and now you have a plethora of prefixes to identify the type of telephone you are ringing, or the area you're calling, or whether you are going to pay extra to listen to a woman with emphysema talk dirty to you.

But one thing has never changed since I was a boy, and that’s the number you have to call when there’s a bit of an emergency.  Naturally, many children today think that you have to call 911 because that’s what the television has been telling them, but we’ve always known that, when you’re about to be stabbed to death by a youth carrying a rusty chainsaw, you have to dial 999 and hope the police can take time out from stopping speeding motorists to give you a hand.

When Edna across the road is suffering from a cardiac arrest having just seen her numbers come up on a Saturday night, 999 will get you straight through to the ambulance service and if Ali lets me in the kitchen you have to ring 999 to ask for the nice men in the bright red fire lorry to come and douse the flames.

Sure, you can ring 112 as well because that’s the default number in Europe so we need to make sure that when Pierre and his family visit they can call for the Heimlich Manoeuvre when they start choking on a piece of well-done steak, but at the end of the day we all know that 999 is an emergency telephone number.

For use in emergencies.

Which means it shouldn’t be used to try and establish what the post code of Grangemouth Police Station is.  Nor should it be used to make a complaint about a motorist who drove through a puddle and splashed a pedestrian waiting for the bus. 

Yet, it seems, many people do actually use the emergency services to make such complaints.  Like the woman who recently called Central Scotland Police on the 999 number to complain that a bunny rabbit she’d just purchased didn’t have floppy ears.

One can only presume that the people who use the telephone number for such purposes are the same people who insist that their Satellite Navigation systems have instructed them to drive in to the sea.

In which case I suggest they follow the instructions the device has given and save the country from having to support them in the future.  

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/tayside_and_central/7616451.stm

Just What Formula One Needed

After the controversies of last week's Belgian Grand Prix, the Formula One teams - and the FIA - headed to Monza desperately hoping that they could rectify the sport's image in the public eye.  Even more so, something needed to be done to take the pressure off them from the British tabloid press, hungry for a news story that would implicate the FIA in either a racism or favouritism case.

A wet qualifying session saw a topsy-turvy grid that resulted in the young Sebastian Vettel qualify on Pole Position in his Scuderia Toro Rosso car, while championship protagonists Kimi Raikkonen and Lewis Hamilton managed a lowly 14th and 15th respectively.

Wet weather continued into today's race and fears of a first corner crash meant that the race director, Charlie Whiting, instructed the Italian Grand Prix to be started under safety car conditions, effectively saving the young German from screwing up his first place position in to the first chicane.

Despite a drive worthy of a champion, however, Hamilton managed to finish in 7th place at the end of a race that had been predominately wet but was drying towards the end, putting him just one place behind main title rival Felipe Massa.  Raikkonen's failure to score any points means that the Finn must now definitely be instructed by Ferrari to aid the Brazilian in his attempts to thwart Hamilton's championship bid.

But while everybody focused on where Hamilton and Massa finished and what difference that made to the driver and constructor championships, Sebastian Vettel kept a solid head to win his first grand prix - and get the first ever victory for Scuderia Toro Rosso.

It worked for the Italian fans, too - Toro Rosso is the former Minardi team, still based in Italy and powered by Ferrari engines.  So while the main Ferrari team failed to do anything impressive at their home event, the baby Italian team went on to score a much deserved maiden victory on home soil.  And Gerhard Berger, who won in Monza for Ferrari in 1988 shortly after the death of the team's founder Enzo, was on the podium again to collect the constructor's trophy for his team.

Toro Rosso's victory was also a rub in the face for Red Bull, the little Italian team's primary owners who use the junior team as an entry position for future drivers.  Red Bull Racing had snubbed the Ferrari engines in favour of Renault, only to find themselves now behind on points.  Luckily for them, German Vettel is joining the big team next season.

On a day when Formula One needed to deliver something very different to rectify its image in the face of the fans and the tabloids, it couldn't have got much better than today's results.

A German winning the race for an Italian team.  Sound familiar?

It was just what F1 needed.

By The Time You Read This, You'll Be Dead

Apparently, the chances are that you won’t be able to read this because by the time you get out of your beds and head for your computers in the morning, we’ll all have been sucked in to a great big black hole – and if that’s the case I might as well confess right now that I did have a dream about Jennifer Aniston and Abi Titmuss last night, because they’re not going to be around to hear about it anyway.

Or, at least, that’s the theory of one or two men with conical-shaped heads who think that when the Large Hadron Collider is activated on Wednesday morning it will generate a black hole that will simply suck the world in to it from the inside out.  Many of them have even attempted to get a restraining order on CERN to prevent the experiment from taking place.

A German chemist with the slightly amusing name of Otto Rossler – and who has clearly watched one too many films by Roland Emmerich – thinks that it will take a little bit longer.  Otto, who has filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights, is convinced that the experiment will generate an unknown quasar in the centre of the earth that will take four years to make itself known, at which point we’ll see a ray of light emerge from the Indian Ocean and then a few weeks later particle streams will emerge from the opposite side of the planet.

Obviously, though, this gives plenty of time for Dennis Quaid, Will Smith and Bruce Willis to team up in a major blockbuster event to save humanity.

In reality, however, the chances are that tomorrow’s experiment will be pretty safe, and we’re guaranteed that because nobody would have been stupid enough to spend the £4.4 billion investment on the LHC if they weren’t guaranteed to get some form of return.  That, and the fact that it’s all taking place in a secret bunker 300 feet below Switzerland that puts anything Blofeld ever designed in the shade.

So what’s it all about then?  Well, scientists believe that the Large Hadron Collider will be able to recreate the effects of the Big Bang and lead to countless lives being saved.  Data collected by firing atomic particles faster than Lewis Hamilton could ever comprehend around a seventeen mile tunnel deep beneath the Alps will apparently fill more than 56 million CDs in a year, and is hoped will lead to cures for cancer, proof that Global Warming is natural and provide an explanation for Jade Goody.

In fact, the only thing that is really worrying is that it is all going to be switched on by a man from Wales.

Dr Lyn Evans, who has apparently sat down with Otto and shown him the errors in his algebra that prove that the weather won’t change and Armageddon isn’t on its way, also points out that there are 2’500 scientists working on this one project alone, and each has checked the other’s arithmetic to make sure that when it gets switched on the worst that can happen is that France will disappear.

Indeed, the scientists working on the particle accelerator are so relaxed about the risks of what they are about to do that they’ve even found time to develop a video and post it on YouTube to explain what is going to happen when Dr Evans switches the LHC on.

Apparently, despite all the hype and expense and secret underground lairs, the experiment tomorrow is simply going to try and recreate the first billionth of a second of the creation of the universe, and then it’ll be switched off again. 

With all this hype, all this attention, all this money and all this expectation leading towards an anti-climactic nanosecond of sheer joy that we’ll all have forgotten about by this time tomorrow night, I can’t help be reminded of my sex life.  And because of that, I have to say the chances are it’s all quite safe and we have nothing to worry about.

No Formula One favouritism to Ferrari; must be racism then

I’ve been a fan of Formula One for as long as I can remember and, throughout it all, my favourite team has always been Ferrari.  Drivers have come and gone, favourites some while others less so, but Ferrari have been there throughout.

As a child, my bedroom wall was adorned with pictures of Ferraris – no other car has thrilled me so much and, had I been the lucky one to win last Friday’s €uroMillions draw I would have trotted out and put my name down for one of those new Californias straight away.

It’s inevitable, then, that when one team has such an evocative history in the sport that there are the odd rumours that Ferrari’s part in the sport reaches deeper in to the political hierarchy than just turning up at the weekend and driving their rather nice cars round and round in circles, very fast indeed.

I’ve always sat on the fence on this particular subject.  I suspect Ferrari probably does have a heavy hand in some political decisions made on how the sport is run, but I tend to err on the side of caution and say that it doesn’t receive exceptional favouritism from the stewards when decisions need to be made that benefit it.  Some may argue with me on this point, but I’ve always been prepared to believe that it’s not happening.

Until yesterday, that is.  In the closing stages of the Spa-Francorchamps Grand Prix, as Lewis Hamilton closed in on Kimi Räikkönen’s Ferrari, we were faced with a fascinating spectacle of two drivers going wheel-to-wheel in dampening conditions.  One driver wanted to extend his overall lead in the championship, the other wanted to make sure he was still in the fight as we headed to Monza next weekend.

Then, to avoid a collision with Räikkönen, Hamilton had to cut the chicane.  It was an easy choice – he was off-line and pushed wide by the Ferrari defending its corner and it was either crash, and take both cars out of the race and therefore hand victory to Lewis’s main rival Felipe Massa, or drive his McLaren over the corner which did, indeed, put him in front of Räikkönen and thereby gain him an unfair advantage.

But here’s the rub: Hamilton immediately slowed his F1 car down, allowed Räikkönen to retake the lead, and then they went back to their racing.  It was a fair and sportsmanlike manoeuvre that allowed both drivers to remain in the race.  The other option was unthinkable for any driver and I suspect even the greats from the past, including Schumacher, Senna and Mansell, would have made the same choice.

As fans, we were then treated to an exciting spectacle as both drivers swapped the lead as they each slid or spun off the track as wet weather conditions worsened.  And then, while leading, Kimi lost control of his Ferrari again, slid across the grass into a barrier, and was out of the race.  All Hamilton had to do then was keep his car on the track and win the race – which he did.

Felipe Massa came second in the other Ferrari and BMW’s Nick Heidfeld, shrewdly swapping to Intermediate tyres as the rain started to fall, secured himself a podium position.  It allowed Hamilton to extend his lead over Massa to eight points and everybody cheered.  After forty-odd laps of not-a-lot happening, the closing stages of the Belgian Grand Prix were riveting.

And then the stewards announced they were investigating Hamilton for gaining an unfair advantage and ultimately hit him with a twenty-five second penalty.  It gave Massa the victory and means tha Hamilton has just a two point advantage over his rival rather than the eight he had legitimately earned.

Disgruntled fans screamed “fix!”, while FIA media personnel tried to assure us that they weren’t deliberately favouring the Italian team, and Ferrari themselves went to measures to assure the media that they had not made any official complaint to the FIA about Lewis’s conduct on track.

I know that McLaren have made several tactical errors at races this season that haven’t helped their driver, and Lewis himself has made some serious blunders – Canada probably being his biggest – but some of the decisions made by the stewards, the weight of the penalties applied to Ferrari and McLaren, both this year and last can only lead one to suspect that maybe there is some truth to the rumours that the FIA prefer to see Ferrari win rather than McLaren.

Because if the rumours aren’t true then that must mean that some members of the FIA Stewardship must secretly also be members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Shock Horror! Big Brother Won By Ordinary Woman From Wales

Apparently, I’ve just learned, a woman from Wales has won the ninth series of Big Brother.  And even though she’s got brown hair and is called Rachel, I don’t actually care.

Over the past thirteen weeks I haven’t watched a single moment of Big Brother preferring, instead, to do something worthwhile with my time.  Therefore, I couldn’t tell you if she flashed her boobs at the cameras or performed Colgate hygiene on a fellow male’s private parts in order to guarantee herself the win.  I have no idea if she was controversial or as quiet as a mouse or whether she cried quietly in the Diary Room because she missed her parents.

Apparently, however, one of her housemates described her as so boring he would actually prefer to swap her for Scrabble.

Over the last 91 days I have managed to do quite a lot.  I’ve obviously worked, but I’ve also been on holiday to Spain.  I’ve cheered Britain on to their greatest results in the Olympics for eighty years and I’ve watched as Lewis Hamilton has taken control of the Formula One Driver’s Championship.  I’ve taken my son to the Motorshow and to London to watch a television programme being made with Richard Hammond.

I’ve been to my brother’s wedding and I’ve got to know my two younger half-brothers much better, and I’ve also learned I’m going to be an uncle.

I’ve had a piece published in The Publican magazine about the trials and tribulations of trying to make a pub more environmentally friendly and I’ve had something printed in the Newmarket Journal about the media’s misperception of the pub trade, and publicans, in general.

And doing all that has meant I’ve earned about ten pence.

The twenty-four year old Miss Rice, however, has sat in a house paid for by a television company, where millions of people the length and breadth of this land have watched her sleep.  And after three months she’s earned £100’000 for her trouble. 

We all like our Andy Warhol moment – let’s be honest, it’s one of the reasons I write this blog – but it worries me that we, as a nation, would rather spend our downtime watching a disparate group of nobodies sit around in a house, slagging each other off whilst simultaneously trying to sleep with each other in order to garner public favour and then, at the end of the day, leave the telly on so we can watch them sleep off their rage.

The newspapers are describing Rachel Rice’s victory as controversial, presumably because she isn’t a lesbian and knows that East Anglia isn’t a separate continent, and that they were surprised that such a boring person actually won.  The bookies were also surprised – but ultimately pleased because they’ve had to pay out far less for her victory than they would have done if a 33 year old blind man called Mikey Hughes had won.

But I’m not surprised at all – voting for somebody who’s dull and ordinary and who is going to take ten percent of her winnings and give it to charity before returning home to buy a car that can go round a roundabout and doesn’t have moss in it is simply the most sensible thing anybody watching this show could have done.

It’s telling everybody that we’re fed up of Endemol deliberately picking more and more outrageous blockheads in order to increase ratings and call-line incomes.  It’s telling them that, in Britain, we actually just like sensible, ordinary, everyday people and are, surprisingly, fed up of controversy.

Letter To The Editor

Earlier this week I wrote in my Publican column that trade was good, everything was rosy and that I'm a happy chappy. Of course, I should have known better than to open my mouth and tempt fate - in fact, I think trade would have been better this week if I had written that the doors were going to be nailed shut and that Germaine Greer would then serve behind the bar. Naked.

Of course, it's the first week back at work and school for many after the summer holidays and the weather has turned even greyer than usual, so it is no surprise that business has quietened off but I still got a little annoyed at the start of the week when I opened one of the local newspapers and read the views of one of their columnists. He's clearly got a little annoyed with the fact that publicans are struggling at the moment but, in a clever move designed to make himself as popular in pubs as Darling, he pointed out that there is no secret to running pubs and that most landlords can't be arsed to get off their backsides and work a bit harder to make things work. They would rather, he said, cry in to their beer and blame bingo and breathalysers for their own failings.

Whilst I won't deny that there are probably one or two lazy publicans out there who would rather find excuses for their pub's failings, I suspect the same could be said for one or two journalists - or, indeed, any other trade you care to mention. Naturally, I felt aggrieved on behalf of all the good publicans, not just in the surrounding areas of Newmarket, but everywhere, and wrote to the newspaper to put forward my thoughts. I thought I'd share the letter with you - and yes, it did feel great to have a bit of a rant!

(The following letter can also be found on the Newmarket Journal website in response to the column of John Bone the preceding week.)

Dear Editor

I have to say I take a little bit of umbrage to the comments of John Bone in this week's Journal. Whilst I do not wish to take away from the success of the team at the Olde Bull, who have done a fantastic job, he seems to imply that many licensees are looking for excuses as to why their businesses are struggling rather than succeeding and while it may be true that there are one or two landlords that simply cannot be bothered to try harder, the vast majority of publicans are hard-working people who are doing everything in their power to make their beloved pubs succeed.

Laziness and excuse-finding can be found in every walk of life and every trade, but it is often a misconception amongst people who have never worked in pubs that once the doors are closed the landlords retire to their Jaguars to count their cash. Nothing could be further from the truth. When the doors are closed there is an incredible amount of hard work that has to go in to making sure the pub is clean and attractive, the beer lines are cleaned for nice cold refreshing beer and that the kitchen is prepared and ready for the next shift. Then there's the cellar maintenance, the gardening and the sheer volume of paperwork that goes in to running a pub. It leaves little time for raising the children or relaxing in front of the TV.

Statistics show that, since the smoking ban, trade is down an average of 11% in Britain's pubs. On top of the ban further adversity comes in the face of the mighty supermarket, the restrictions and covenants imposed by the breweries and Alistair Darling's draconian 'alcohol-accelerator' tax. I'm not even counting the poor weather or impending recession here, but an average of two pubs a day across the country are currently closing their doors - many for good. That sheer volume cannot, alone, be down to publicans crying too easily into their own ale.

Many pubs desperately need to raise their prices to meet the increasing costs of electricity (mine has risen 100% this year), gas, water and oil, let alone turn their business into a successful and profitable one, but they daren't because that will simply drive more and more former regulars to the supermarket where they can pick up the equivalent of a pint for 66p. Pubs are sociable, fun places where people from all walks of life can meet in lively, friendly atmospheres to relax and enjoy each other's company; but, if we aren't careful, there aren't going to be many left.

The publicans I know are entertaining, hard-working individuals who run great pubs and provide excellent service. If they do, at all, cry in to their ale it is only because they are fed up of being beaten up by the establishment and disparaged by a media full of incorrect perceptions of the trade and left with very little in the pot to keep the bank manager happy.

Regards, Mark Daniels, The Tharp Arms

The Publican: How Bad Is It Going To Get?

My latest post on The Publican website is now up for viewing. Click here to see it...