I just want to go to the pub

Last week I took my two-year-old son Charlie for a walk through the centre of Beverley, my lovely hometown. It was the first time I’d ventured into town since the lockdown. It was nice to walk down the high street, following my boy on his scooter. For brief moments it almost felt normal and I felt a fragile but comforting sense of serenity.

Sadly, the conditions of the lockdown are so jarring that these moments of contentment don’t last. A high street that is ordinarily thriving and bustling is dead quiet. They remain empty, dark and locked. Some of them may never open their doors again. On every door there is a plague notice: DUE TO COVID-19 WE ARE CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. It makes me feel anxious and sad.

The weather is beautiful. People should be sitting at the tables outside the cafes, ordering their lunches in restaurants, browsing in shops and piling into the pub for a nice cold beer. The virus has ruined everything.

Then I get to the town square. When I think of that town square, I have a vision of a busy marketplace. I can hear the noise of the pubs. I can hear people chatting, laughing and living their lives as they have for over a thousand years. Now? Nothing. An eerie emptiness. Deathly silence. There is no refuge from the pandemic.

The pubs are all closed. The usual customers are at home with their ‘household’ drinking tinnies and pining for the pub. Well, I assume it’s not just me.

Beverley is chock full of fantastic pubs. Not just any old pubs, but the pubs where I had my first drink and I hope to have my last. Pubs where I made and met friends, socialised with strangers, watched sports, read quietly, had one or two confrontations and scuffles and occasionally got a little too rowdy. These pubs could tell all sorts of stories about my life. Thank God they can’t talk.

Ah, the public house. It holds a special place in the heart. I have always had a romantic view of pubs. I’ve never felt uncomfortable attending one alone to read, watch football or just have a quiet drink and people watch. It’s a place to connect with other human beings. Sometimes that connection can be made without even speaking to one another. It’s just the simple fact of both being in the same place, at the same time in the same atmosphere.

A pub is a place to go to talk with friends or loved ones, but I always like it when I end up talking with strangers. Those spontaneous moments when they intervene in your overheard discussion, or you in theirs, and it leads to a long chat or debate. Or those times when the pub weirdo who’s had one or five too many blathers his way into your conversation. This was often as tedious as it was amusing but I’d kill for that to be happening to me right now.

One of my life’s great pleasures is standing at a bar and enjoying the presence of those around me. Even if we never exchange a word. The pub is a refuge. From loneliness. From the troubles haunting you that you leave at the door. Damn this virus, I just want to go the pub, with my wife, with my friends, alone with my thoughts and the drunken strangers.

The pub I love most in the world is the “White Horse Inn” in Beverley. Everyone calls it “Nellies” because a woman called Francis Collinson bought the pub from the church in 1927 and her daughter Nellie managed it right up until its sales to the Samuel Smiths Brewery in 1976. That fact alone endears the place to me.

The pub was originally a coaching inn opened in 1666 and when I’m sitting in there cosy and content it’s like a makeshift time machine. I bet the atmosphere in there has changed little over the centuries. It’s illuminated only by gas lights, chandeliers and open fires. It’s kind of like a typical old man’s pub but its charm, reputation and prices have always attracted a broad age range.

Visit at lunch time on a Tuesday though and you’ll see the good old blokes sitting alone at the marble topped tables supping their bitter, reading their paper and having a natter. Bliss.

When you enter the old place you go through the door into a labyrinth of stony corridors and gas mantles. The main bar is warmed by the roasting fire and dimly lit by the windows and flames. The ancient, battered benches are surprisingly comfortable and welcoming. The conversation is often communal and friendly. The sheer historicity of it fills me with joy.

I’ve been going there for 17 years but people have been necking ale in Nellies for centuries.

I remember my first nights out in that pub at 18 years old. Get a pint from the bar, walk through the Dickensian corridors and into the back room. There my friends and I would spend all night chain smoking until the ash tray overflowed and it was time to stumble home. I long to sit there in one of the little mirth filled rooms by the fire. It breaks my heart to see it shut down.

I’ll be in the pub the day they open, but will it be back to “normal”? The “new normal” with social distancing and restrictions will kill what is pleasurable about the experience and leave them half empty.

If we drag out reopening many will never welcome another customer and many more will be killed off by the social distancing delusion that threatens the entire hospitality sector. Restricted seating, restricted toilets, restricted headcount, no football, no live music. A soulless, anxious atmosphere. High street after high street, estate after estate and village after village will lose the heart of their community, their hub of social engagement.

If we cower before the virus forever there will be no decent life to return to.

Sunetra Gupta, a professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University, has suggested there is a “strong possibility” that the hospitality industry could get back to work without posing a danger to the public. I’ll tell you what, I’ll lead by example. Open the doors and I’ll be there until the last orders bell rings, and it’ll be music to my ears.