Middle class hikers and small vases of cut flowers in the Rolle Quay Inn

It is good, of course, that fewer fathers are absent alcoholics these days, but the result of fewer pounds spent on ale in local pubs is that landlords are forced to look elsewhere for profits.

Offering food and enticing in women has saved some pubs from ruin. But these changes have also ruined pubs. Barnstaple's Rolle Quay Inn is not at all ruined but it has a minor deterrent: small vases of cut flowers.

I have nothing against small vases of cut flowers, as long as they are kept in their natural home: tea rooms where neat old ladies put china cups on lace doilies.

When I visited the Rolle Quay, it was 7.30pm on a gloomy, but dry, Thursday night at the height of the inglorious summer of 2008. I identified the regulars, because regulars tend to mark their territory like many other mammals. Rather than spraying urine about the place, I assumed, the regulars had opted for the usual pub voodoo of sitting in a line along the bar, where they could talk to the staff and prevent everyone else from enjoying easy access to the beer. This is an old pub game and it should not be attacked, because it forces strangers to talk to regulars and gives regulars a much-needed sense of power.

The rest of the pub, which easily passed the Adam's Ale "window test" (wooden windows good, plastic windows bad) was empty, apart from the furniture: chairs, tables, carpet, framed photographs of local scenes (when men were men and pubs were pubs and small vases of cut flowers were only ever seen in church) oh, and small vases of cut flowers. These days, pubs in Barnstaple are seldom busy on week nights, so the lack of custom was unsurprising. I was, however, dismayed to see small vases of cut flowers on each table.

The Rolle Quay is a St Austell's brewery pub and my pint was made by that Cornish firm. St Austell's beers are refreshing and decent. My pint was clearly from a well-kept cellar.

I had a choice of too many tables with too many little vases of cut flowers, so my eyes darted around like a man lost in a carpark, but I chose a seat next to a window so I could look at an abandoned stone warehouse, the steely sky and the ugly block of mundane new flats (with plastic windows) on the quay. Did prospective custom lurk in that brick and white plastic factory of dreams? To misquote Morrissey, planning regulations have so much to answer for.

I had a newspaper, but did not get the chance to read the tales of murder and rape in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Ten seconds after I sat down, a couple of middle-aged middle-class hikers sat at the table next to me.

I get an almost-religious joy from walking in the North Devon countryside (I LOVE IT BEYOND REASON!)but I have never felt the need to do so wearing khaki shorts. Other people are less considerate.

And it would be easy to reduce to silly caricature the hikers who joined me in the Rolle Quay Inn that evening. So I will. They were aged in their late-50s, he with big grey beard, she with big grey legs. They wore shorts and waterproof rucksacks. I might have hallucinated this, but I think sandals were in evidence. They had the energetic fizz of retired teachers, freed at last from the punishing whims of England's perpetually disobedient, endlessly disappointing, children. If you wanted to button down the cliche once and for all, you would say they were Guardian readers.

I was, unusually, in no mood for eavesdropping, but it was hard to resist their conversation, littered as it was with commuter belt pellets of pomposity and such delights as: "It's always SO much better to come to these backstreet sort of places". Indeed.

No doubt reassured by the wooden window frames and small vases of cut flowers, this pair of woolly explorers were in for a shock when the landlord appeared.

He was a wiry little man of middle-aged years with long, lank, hair and the general air of a hard rocker who spent the 1970s carrying amplifiers and cider for Motorhead. I am sure he is a first-class landlord (the beer is certainly well-kept) but the hikers exchanged glances which said: "I suppose they let him take the orders in exchange for a bag of crisps." It was only when they asked him to thank "the landlord" for their food, and he said "that's me", did they bristle with shocking embarrassment and perhaps even a measure of regret, or even indigestion.

Fifteen minutes earlier, the couple had decided what they wanted to eat from the menu of solid pub food favourites (fish and chips, pie, curry) and had chosen to have starters as well as main courses. I bet they live in a converted grain store.

So they went on, exchanging condescending views about Barnstaple and the pub as if they were the cleverest human beings in all the Queen's land, and there was some private family mini-crisis I couldn't follow, no matter how hard I tried. No other customers arrived, but the pub has a lively darts scene and is (a bit) busier at weekends, I later discovered.

I drank my pint of Cornish ale quicker than I would normally have done, and rolled my unread copy of the Guardian under my arm, like a proper regular, almost. I half feared the hikers might try and speak to me as I got up to leave, still steady on my Brasher boots; we were so near each other.

But they didn't, and I left as the landlord turned on a stereo and allowed a Thin Lizzy song to escape at refreshing volume.

THE ROLLE QUAY INN, ROLLES QUAY, BARNSTAPLE

ADAM'S ALE RATING: 3 OUT OF 5

DRINK THIS BEER: ANY ST AUSTELL ALE, OR HAVE A PUNT ON THE GUEST BEER