What about blue drinks, pickled eggs, and anyone prepared to ingest either of them, asks Fleet Street Fox
It is a sign of how sick British society has become that when pub landlord Brian Hoyle banned under-21s from his pub because they’re “unable to handle their booze” it caused anything but a murmuring of general assent.
For such a murmuration is the only acceptable noise within a British pub, aside from about four Genesis tracks played on a loop at the edge of hearing. It is the sound of contented, calm, stress-free imbibing of a liquid which humanity stumbled upon by happy accident, and which just so happened to arrange its molecules in such a way that it caused our brains and bodies to relax.
Oh, you can have pubs that play Right Said Fred on a Saturday night if you insist, ones that shun horse brasses on the walls, or even those that have the word ‘jus’ on their menus. The British pub is a broad church, ranging from dingy to proper poncey.
But it is a bit ripe for student Neil Finley, 19, to bemoan “age discrimination” as the reason he and his fellow travellers in late adolescence are no longer welcome at The Orange Tree in Hereford. The reason you’re not allowed in, son, is because 19-year-olds are idiots.
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In a race to the bottom of the profits barrel, the British pub has allowed impure foodstuffs, contaminating drinks, and patronage by those not conducive to pleasurable ease.
Mr Hoyle is not guilty of age discrimination, as he makes no mention of problems with 3-year-olds, and we all know they can be tricky customers. The upside of taking a toddler to the pub is they don’t require a meal and often generate free crisps. Although they rarely stand their round, the child benefit is useful in emergencies.
Where he has failed, though, where he has seriously let down the entire British pub-going public, is that he has stopped at listing just six things he no longer wishes to see in his pub: under-21s, sportswear, hoodies, tracksuits, bumbags or Stone Island clothing.
Let’s be honest. The list of what must be banned from British pubs is a lot longer than that.
For example:
1. Blue drinks
2. Anyone prepared to ingest a blue drink, as they’re either sick in the head, took a wrong turn while looking for anti-freeze at the garage, or are too hammered to be trusted
3. Pickled eggs, because whoever eats one is determined to be anti-social
4. Yellow trousers, because ditto
5. Matt Hancock
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The simple fact is that Britain has been doing pubs wrong since we invented a warm, safe place in which to drink: we let everyone in. Everyone could drink, regardless of the wisdom of letting them do so.
And we’ve been restricting it for the past 135 years on the basis of age alone. The 1886 Intoxicating Liquors (Sale to Children) Act banned the sale of alcohol to children under 13, which must have made life as a chimney sweep much less bearable.
The law was updated in 1901 to ban sale of alcohol to anyone under 14, unless it was in a sealed bottle and they were going to drink it elsewhere, in which case there you go kid, do you want pork scratchings with that.
By 1908 there were so many parents sending their children off to the pub to buy a jug of beer and bring it home – often suspiciously lighter by the time it arrived – that children under 14 were just banned from pubs. At the same time we said it was legal to give your child alcohol, so long as they were 5 or older.
In 1923 we raised the drinking age to 18. But in those days, the average 18-year-old had been working for six years, and was probably a parent or soon would be. Today, as any 18-year-old will demonstrate if you suggest this to them, they’re petulant, infantilised, and easily-enraged. Pubs are the last place they should be allowed.
Rather than steadily outlawing booze for children of increasing size, we should have been legalising it from the elderly down. There’s nothing better for the spirit than seeing a grandmother three sheets to the wind, and older people benefit from a total lack of hangover and a landlord-pleasing surplus of cash.
The Orange Tree in Hereford, and every other pub in the land, should be rolling out access to their premises in the same way as the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation rolled out the covid jab. The oldest first, along with those most in need like new mums, hard-bitten murder detectives, and journalists, followed by the rest of society in strict order of age, with built-in delays to assess the data.
Every customer should be asked if they would like a blue drink, and when you reach the point where the response is “oh, yes please”, rather than pulling the same face as someone who’s just stood in cat s***, you’ve reached peak pub occupancy. The age of that customer – probably around 23, 24 – then becomes the new legal drinking age.
At a stroke, we’d cut public disorder, policing costs, and the number of people getting blue piss pumped out of their stomachs in A&E on Saturday nights. Pubs would never be stressful again, society would have caught up with the fact childhood now lasts well into the 20s, and landlords could concentrate on the massive profits that can be milked from grown-ups drinking to forget mortgages, loans, and families, rather than teens wailing about being treated like children when, in fact, they’re still at school.
If they don’t like it, they’ll just have to grow up a bit, won’t they?
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