Image Credit: Compilation/Jennifer Stahn

I have been going to pubs since before I was born. I like pubs, or at least I used to. But there has been a slow erosion of everything pubs stand for, which culminated this week in a catastrophic sign appearing outside my favourite local watering hole. It read: “New! Childrens Menu.”

Given the missing apostrophe I imagined for a moment they had begun serving char-broiled toddler and chips, but the truth is even more unpalatable. In their infinite stupidity, the morons who govern us have decreed that children be allowed into pubs, seriously violating this last bastion of adult sanctuary.

I entered with trepidation. Sure enough, one table was occupied by a brace of tiresome tots and their indifferent parents. I watched in desperation as one of the brats spilled its drink and began to cry. I admit this behaviour is not unusual in my local pub, but a child doing it is somehow far less amusing. At one point the unruly urchins were even permitted to wander around unfettered. One approached me at the bar so I offered to buy it a beer. Thankfully it ran back to its seat to get away from the scary man.

Pubs are not places for children; they are places where grown-ups go to behave like children. And they are being progressively ruined by sanctimonious do-gooders who think they know what’s best for everyone. This is unacceptable.

It’s time we did a little pub cleaning. First to go will be the kiddies, back to the Red Robin where they belong. Next to leave, with a boot in his bottom, will be the annoying 20-something “manager” all pubs seem to have recently spawned whose sole purpose is to cut people off, or in the ghastly jargon of our times “prevent customers being over-served.” Thank you very much Nanny, but I shall decide when I’ve been sufficiently served, and will indicate when that point has been reached by toppling over. Your job is to keep taking my money until I fall down, then call me a cab. My address is written on a scrap of paper in the breast pocket of my jacket.

Finally, pubs must be prohibited from serving food. It attracts the wrong type of people, and anyway pub food is universally awful, consisting almost entirely of oily chicken wings, flaccid salads and indigestible burgers made of drywall and recycled tires.

How to achieve this long overdue renaissance, you ask? Simple. We bring back smoking. The modern Mommies will run screaming from the premises faster than you can say “pass the matches,” dragging their irritating offspring behind them. The Nannies will disappear, tutt-tutting and cough-coughing in the aromatic haze. And nobody will have enough appetite to eat the appalling food.

Only then will pubs be returned to their rightful clientele: foul-mouthed, pool-playing youths, serially-divorced middle-aged men, and those of us wrinklies still sensible enough to view self-destruction as a preferable alternative to senility. Cheers.

— As a child, the Grumpy Old Git had the good sense to drink BEHIND the pub.

News from © iNFOnews, 2014