My incantation did not work, and I think I know why.

In September 2008, seven months ago, I blogged a rather tongue-in-cheek "incantation", urging you all to go to the North Country Inn, in Barnstaple town centre. It is probably the town's oldest pub and has (still) not been ruined, as far as I can tell, by redevelopment or fashionable decoration. I really wanted this pub to succeed, to become a much-needed beer-drinking gem; the building and interior are superb, and it has a reasonable location.

I really wanted - want - that pub to succeed, because I can see the potential, but my plea was, in hindsight, somewhat misguided and too optimistic. The North Country Inn, which is owned by Enterprise Inns, one of the giant pubcos who are getting a lot of abuse from MPs, landlords and drinkers, has closed and is up for sale. I don't know who is to blame for the pub closing, but I know why I didn't go there after my last visit.

The second-to-last time I visited the North Country, and I was not a regular, I enjoyed some simple but enjoyable pub grub and a decent pint.  The place seemed friendly, if a little bare and devoid of Proper Local atmosphere, but it had, as I say, potential, not least because of its fabulous wooden windowframes. Well that was then.

The last time I visited, what I took to be the manic desperation of a pub fighting the wrong battle for survival was in evidence: the tacky corporate-style posters in display cases on the wall outside the front door, advertising wares as if the pub was a branch of McDonald's not one of North Devon's most historic inns, and the skull-splittingly loud pop music both indicated to me that this place had missed a trick and was doomed. At the bar, things were worse.

A handful of drinkers, most of whom had yet to see their 21st birthday, I guessed, stood with the unrelaxed demeanour of teenagers everywhere, occasionally shouting chunks of "conversation" above the tinny house music; I actually felt a bit sorry for them; it was hardly a carefree vibe. The barmaid was very friendly, but told me there was no real beer, only lager and Guinness. I ordered a pint of the latter, and the poor girl had no idea how to pour it.

I took my badly-poured pint to the unsurprisingly-empty front section of the pub, and hunkered down beneath the occasional teenage shouts and techno. I went in to a damage-limitation reverie and thought of a bustling, but unmaniac, town centre local, with a row of glorious well-kept local ales on offer, a careful and knowledgeable landlord or landlady busy behind the bar, groups of friends enjoying animated conversations at tables, maybe an old man reading the cricket scores at the bar, a game of darts in one corner, a round of cards in another corner, and all among us the unspoken sense that character and community are better friends than corporations and spreadsheets, and the enlivening feeling of useful escape from work and duty.

I drank my pint as quickly as I could and escaped in to the dank night, keeping my remaining beer cash for another day.

I am a passionate pub lover and I say this with no satisfaction: the deadwood in our pub trade is being felled.

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?