Queuing in pubs

The end of the world or not

‘Uncle Dave! Over here!’ 

There is the answering bellow of a well-fed man, who is wearing a large t-shirt that tells the world that old guys rule, a bellow that punches through the air of my local (a former warehouse built in the 19th century) on a sunny Saturday afternoon. I am inside, but outside, on the edge of the Exeter Canal basin, gangs of friends gather, glasses to hand, laughter and handshakes, while parents keep an eye on their small children especially if they look like running away. Inside, where I sit, it is calmer and less densely populated as Uncle Dave and others dedicate their time to pints of beer brewed in the adjoining room and tips on who they backed in the Grand National. Talking of which, the fast ticker-tape diction of the commentator vies with the chattering laughter of an irritating man in another corner of the bar who has the murderous race on his phone.

I sit on a stool in an area towards the back of the bar, my stammtisch if you like, where you will often find me with a notebook, writing and observing the whys and wherefores of pub culture or just thinking with a benign sense of drift. On this benevolent afternoon in the middle of April, there is only one subject I can contort myself about: the tendency of queuing in pubs, a phenomenon that is happening in front of me at this moment of writing. The bar at the pub is long, maybe the length of three (or four) picnic tables stretched out and there is space at a third of it, but about eight people are queuing and when more folk enter they join the queue which soon enough could head outdoors, where the waiting staff from the pizza van outside will have to dance and dodge when bringing in orders for those inside. 

There is uncertainty it seems with this queue, dithering even. One woman puts her hand up to try and get a server’s notice, even though there is a plenty of space in front of her to the right of the bar. It is a dance of uncertainty, while a noisy 10-year-old boy rumbles around on the wooden floor on his scooter, narrowly missing a man gingerly carrying a couple of pints. Three people come in, a couple and an older man, perhaps father to one of the two; the younger woman has a dog on the lead, a golden labrador, patient and well-trained. They queue. There are three young guys (including my son) behind the bar, hospitality heroes on this Saturday afternoon’s Battle of Thermopylae, holding the pass as the words ‘anyone waiting’ are called out to those unsure and unsteady of how to behave. I sit and watch, aware of the long time I have spent in pubs and I have a shameful confession to make on how I used to wave bank notes in order to get served. 

Thoughts on queuing in pubs. It seems to me that various fragments of pub etiquette have been scattered, thrown to the four winds, chucked into the abyss of ill-memory, and I think about how I once learned to behave in pubs as I grew up. Looking back I presume it would have been the influence of older members of the group I drank with, in college, or afterwards when my then girlfriend and I would go to the pub at weekends and pick up behavioural patterns. Unlike many others I did not have the luxury of going to pubs frequented by family members, because the only one in my family who was a pub man when I started going to them was my paternal grandfather. However, by then he in a care home, dribbling and crying and asking about the family dog Brutus, who had been dead for four years, and anyway grandad Birmingham as my brother and I called him died just before I turned 19. So I had none of that familial surveillance others I knew could recall, the eye in the pub sky that kept watch. Would it have made any difference though? In my late teens I went to pubs where there were people my own age, especially of the other gender. I wanted a laugh, to meet someone and fall in love, to get a bit pissed (and occasionally I got very pissed), and have a good time in the company of strangers and friends. However, occasionally, this sense of joy turned sour as when a close friend of mine was in a pub in Colwyn Bay where a fight broke out and one unfortunate lad got glassed and bled to death as the glass had pierced his carotid artery. My friend saw this stranger die in front of him as the blood spurted out.

Back to queuing. Sometimes it seems to me that of late we have lost the ability to recreate a pre-pandemic world within our pubs. That was how I felt last Saturday whilst observing the queues that developed at my local pub as the warm weather trout-tickled out folk from their firesides and hearths and total entertainment systems. As I once wrote in a national newspaper three years ago when all restrictions in pubs were dropped, I had always liked the cut and thrust of jostling at the bar, something that every pub devotee learned from an early age. The bar was also the place where conversations could be struck up with strangers, something I had also enjoyed. Queuing at the bar, let us be honest, is not the end of civilisation but to me it is another post-pandemic purging of the soul and a quirk that manages to irk me in my irritation. So maybe, going back to this afternoon last weekend, I should soften my judgmental thoughts and think about how that this hesitation at the bar is perhaps the result of the pandemic, though then I recall as I mused I saw a man with a face like a world of leather come through the door with two elderly terriers, ancient and much loved, grizzled faces, tired eyed, looking myopically about. He didn’t queue.