In a long life, some of my happiest times have been spent in pubs. Here’s a tribute to four that I miss to this day…
There’s a BBC television programme called Escape to the Country in which people are taken to an area of rural UK in which they’d like to live and shown houses which they (almost) never buy.
At the beginning of each show, people are asked what they’d like to find in their new dream home. They speak of numbers of bedrooms, open-plan kitchens, sheds and pretty views.
From my position on the couch, I know exactly what I’d ask should I ever be able to buy a house in an English village.
I would fix the interviewers with a steely gaze and say: “The house must be within five-minute’s walking distance of a decent pub. Do not show me any other kind of house. And no, I don’t care if it has a shed or not.”
I mean – what is the point of living in England if you can’t do down the pub of a Friday night?
A lifetime in pubs
My obsession with pubs started a long time ago.
When I grew up in 70s South Africa, pubs were not a thing. But then, in the mid 1980s I got a job as a reporter on the Cape Times and, like a little duckling, followed my colleagues when they asked if I wanted a drink after work.
We went round the corner from the Cape Times’s entrance in Burg Street in Cape Town, and entered the dim recesses of what was known as “the Press Club” at the Café Royal.
And like the little duckling I was, I imprinted firmly and fiercely on that pub, the people and the culture. I was forever destined to be in love with a pub, or with several of them at a time.
I should note that I’d love a pub even if I was drinking tea in it. My relationship with the alcohol supplied in pubs has been more love/hate than love, and is a story for a different day. It’s the companionship and warmth of a pub that captures me, every time.
In fact, I met my husband Bob in the convivial atmosphere of a pub. After almost thirty years of marriage later, our first act when travelling to a new place will be to find the nearest drinking establishment. Our motto: We love a pub, the tattier the better.
Down memory lane
Last week, we played the album Talking Timbuktu, a collaboration by Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré and American guitarist Ry Cooder. Oh, said Bob, I miss the Chelsea Arts Club.
The Chelsea Arts Club was a small place, on Dunkley Square in central Cape Town. It can’t have been in existence for much more than a year, somewhere in the early 1990s. The two of us are possibly the only people who remember it. It had a gorgeous young waiter with long blond hair, who played Talking Timbuktu repeatedly. We’d sit on its streetside tiny balcony of a long summer evening, drinking a beer or two, gazing out at the square and its comings and goings. And indeed, I miss it too.
Our foray into memories of the Chelsea Arts Club led us down other memory paths. This is a blog post topic, I said to Bob (only the writers of weekly columns can know the delight of the moment when an idea strikes). I will write about pubs we have loved and lost. Good idea, he said.
The list starts with the Press Club, all those years ago.
The Café Royal
This is the ur-pub, for me. The Cape Town Press Club in those days generally established a relationship with a particular drinking hole, the idea being that local and visiting journalists could gather there when in need of a drink (which was often in those hard-drinking bad times). The pub was wood-panelled and had what I think are called banquettes, upholstered in ageing red velvet. All the wood was dark, the lighting was dim and the bar ranged long along a back wall. The cheap white wine was just one step above vinegar and the bar snacks were truly terrible (fried Vienna sausages, anyone?). But I loved the place and spent many, many evenings there.
Then sometime in the mid-1980s, the building burnt down – something I am sad about to this day.
Talk of the Town
After some months, the Press Club settled on an Indian restaurant in Burg Street as the drinking hole of choice. It wasn’t traditionally kitted out as a pub, but it was dark and cool and run by the wonderful Moodliar family who took to the role of publicans with aplomb. It was here that I met a friend on the day she got her divorce finalised at the Supreme Court just up the road; here that an Australian-born sub-editor revealed to us that there are way more verses of Waltzing Mathilda than you think there are (by dint of singing all of them) and here that I joined forces with my now-husband. The people who I spent Friday nights with in the Talk of the Town are my friends to this day.
I don’t know when Talk of the Town closed down but do wish it was still around.
Home Restaurant and Bar
This pub was on 2nd Avenue in Harfield Village. We found it by accident. We’d been to another restaurant along the road in search of a couple of beers before going on to eat somewhere, but the place was really busy. We asked if we could sit at a reserved table because we’d be done with our two beers long before the arrival time of the table’s guests. The waiter was agreeable but a manager further up the hierarchy was not, and essentially told us to leave.
We crossly abandoned our beers and drove down 2nd Avenue to a collection of restaurants, parked and wandered up the road. I spotted the sign that said “Home” and said I could do with something that feels like home, let’s try that. We went in and asked the waitress if we could just order two beers. She looked puzzled and said of course. We finished the beers and then saw it was also a restaurant. Could we eat, we asked. Of course, she said. Do whatever you want. We were hooked. We fetched up at Home many times after that – it was essentially a “local”, a gathering place for people who lived in the area.
Sadly, that home from home did not survive the Covid-19 pandemic. Every now and then, I think of it wistfully, wishing I could go there for a beer or two.
Even aliens like pubs
At the start of Douglas Adams’s Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Ford Prefect (a hitch-hiking alien) persuades bewildered human Arthur Dent to come down to the pub. That’s because the earth is about to be destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass and Ford knows they’ll need the muscle-relaxing properties of alcohol to hitch a lift on a passing spaceship. Adams writes:
“Six pints of bitter,” said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. “And quickly please, the world’s about to end.”
I’m with Ford. Pubs are places of warmth, companionship and safety. Should the world end, I hope to be sitting in a pub like the Horse and Groom with Bob when it happens.
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Main picture: The Dog’s Bollocks Pub, Groningen, The Netherlands, Victor Clime, Unsplash
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