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pubs

What are pubs for?

Why do people even bother going to the pub? Or, to put that another way, what does the pub have that you can’t get at home?

One obvious answer is: other people. You might be sat in the corner on your own reading the paper, but you want there to be other people around. Empty pubs are depressing places.

Another possible answer is: proper beer. For some people, that means cask-conditioned beer. For quite a few other people, it just means anything fresh tasting off a pump, hence the push to sell those little kegs for drinking at home which will supposedly replicate the experience.

For me, though, the reason the pub is special is because it’s like home, but not home. Your local pub should feel as comfortable as your front room but, unlike your front room, there should be the buzz of conversation, decent beer and, most importantly, four walls to stare at that aren’t your own four walls.

4 replies on “What are pubs for?”

I sometimes like sitting in an empty pub with a newspaper and a beer. I’d rather sit in a pub than a Starbucks

Well my front room is a pub, of sorts, and my local pub is anything but that which you would want to sit in let alone drink what they have on offer. Still I take your point and when I am lucky enougth to visit decent pubs all your points are true.

Kieran — thanks for stopping by. Weirdly, I think I’ve used the word local in a sense which only makes sense in the context of pubs. My *actual* local is a kind of disco for drug dealers, as far as I can tell, and serves four different types of Fosters. The pub I *think of* as my local is actually nowhere near my house.

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