Metro Pulse/View from a Broad/Pubs is Pubs

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Where everybody knows your name

by Tamar Wilner

Most Englishmen have a local, that pub 'round the corner where they can count on seeing friends and catching up over a pint. For my husband's family in Ansdell, Lancashire, that local is the Ansdell Institute. A strange name, to be sure, for unless you count pub quizzes, no learning goes on there. It's more of a working man's club, a neighborhood association of sorts. About every other evening, Will's dad will ask, "Anyone up for a swift half?" and the whole family will trundle off down the road for their evening lager. It took me three years to figure out that "swift half" was only a figure of speech. It was more like a leisurely four halves.

Funny thing is, this place that sells cheap beer and tall measures of spirits, where one New Year's Eve got so rowdy that glasses flew at the bartenders' heads, mostly is a congenial meeting place for Will's parents and their generation. It's a bit like church. We pile into the car—me, Will, his mum and dad—and drive a couple minutes away. We greet an endless parade of well-

wishers, all of whom seem to remember me, though I don't remember them. There's hugs, kisses on the cheek for the ladies, slaps on the back for the men. We get asked the same questions over and over—So are you back in England for good now? Where are you two living now? Are you living in England? In the Institute, where members get drinks at deep discount, often the same person asks all three questions.

Of course, this doesn't happen in the States, or at least it doesn't happen in my family. "Where did you go last night?" my mom would ask, when she phoned me up in Knoxville on Sunday mornings. "Bar," I'd say, and I could hear her grimace. Usually she'd follow up with, "I hope you didn't drink too much." The fact that I sometimes did drink too much is not the point. The point is often I didn't get drunk at all. Sometimes I was so busy talking I only managed to drink one beer all night. But my mother can't believe bars serve a purpose other than getting people drunk. In the States, bars just aren't morally acceptable places to gather with your community.

Certainly that never stopped us at Macleod's. It always struck me how much that place resembles a true English pub. Yes, there's the dark wood, the cramped interiors, the fine beers served in (near)pint glasses. But, more than that, it's a local. Most people can't walk there, but then we never walked to the Institute anyway. The important thing is, when you get there, the bartender and his swarm of barflies will greet you by name. Even if "Tamar" never had the same ring as "Norm."

I'd like to pretend that a local must be quirky and unique, that to be truly yours a bar can't feel like it also belongs to Trenton and Topeka. And yet, there must be people for whom an O'Charley's or a T.G.I. Friday's serves as a perfectly good local. High-falutin' aesthetics aside, all a local really needs is people you wouldn't mind chatting with night after night. Cheap beer and a good location usually seal the deal. So if Hooters really meets those criteria, who am I to stop you? I just wouldn't take my mother there.

I'm ashamed to admit, for all my pontificating about the joys of the local, I don't really have one here in Oxford. There's the bar at my husband's college, but that seems a little too easy, and there are other places we go more often. A given weekend will usually find us at The Turf or the King's Arms, but it's hard to feel those really are our own. Each is hundreds of years old and smack-dab in the city center, and they attract a constantly revolving crowd of students and tourists. If we left tomorrow, no one would miss us one bit.

Besides, we like to spread our love (and money) around town: there's the Radcliffe Arms for cheap eats, Jude the Obscure for quiz nights, and the Trout as an excuse for an hour's walk in the countryside. The Yellow Pages list 36 pubs within a one-mile radius of my flat; add clubs and college bars to that figure, and the number of neighborhood drinking establishments more than doubles. How could I confine myself to just one? Let's say I have 15 friends. If I go to a given bar or pub, there's only a one-in-five chance I'll see a friend there (and that's assuming they all drink alone.)

Here I'm spoilt for choice, not just in watering holes, but in water as well. Would I like a lager? Bitter? Ale? Which ale—Old Speckled Hen? Wadsworth 6X? Every time, it seems, I get something different.

And every time I find myself at a loss to choose. I begin to yearn for my Knoxville drinking days. There was a comfort in walking into Macleod's and having Tim pull a Sierra before I even had to ask. Sometimes, the joy is in not talking.