Beer Vs Beer

A strangely serious post this week...

George Orwell wrote an essay in 1946 about the cost of buying books, which he compared to the cost of buying cigarettes. He wanted to look at the assumption that buying books was "too expensive" for most people, so he made a rough calculation of how much he had spent on reading material. The sum seemed like a lot, but it was much less than what he was spending on tobacco. Orwell was a relatively frugal man but he did smoke a lot, in common with most of his contemporaries.

In the essay he went on to question the relationship between the financial cost of his books and their actual value to him. His essay concluded: "And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive."

I think this sort of thinking could apply to how we view our pubs, which must be treasured as community enginerooms as well as unique pieces of an historical jigsaw.

In these times of rising unemployment, plunging pension pots and depressed wages, it might seem crazy to encourage people to buy beer and food in our pubs. But surely a small amount of our spending is about choice and is about the total enjoyment of our lives. What is exciting about beer and pubs should be more important than the mere ingestion of ethanol alcohol.

Whenever I am in a supermarket I see queues of people with trolleys stacked with junk food and cheap alcohol among the necessities. That's their choice and I'm no health freak. My argument is that the value of cheap alcohol in supermarkets is much less than the value of a pint in a good local pub in North Devon and Torridge. Try this rhetorical calculation and think about the choice:

You earn the minimum wage or not much more and after paying the bills and everything else unavoidable as well as charitable giving, you are left with £3 one Friday night to spend on the treat that might greatly increase your happiness in the drizzly depth of December. That £3 could buy enough alcohol from a supermarket to make you drunk. You could get some powerful booze, go home, watch the TV and sink in to a private oblivion. Or you could have a friendly pint of beer in your local pub, where you will meet people, and hopefully find humour or gossip. When I was a hospital porter earning £10,000 a year and paying my own way, I always had a couple of quid to go to my local for a pint.

And just as a book might add more joy and music to your life than a packet of cigarettes, and with value impossible to calculate in terms of money, so too a trip to the pub will improve your life more than a turn down the aisles in the superstore. How can it not?