Pringle jumpers and cigars and cheese chunks on cocktail sticks and muddy knees on Sunday footballers and darts team buffets and lock-ins and pork scratchings. These are a few of my favourite things. Buying a pub is a nice thought. We went to look at two yesterday. The first was on the Hoxton/Islington borders in a very smart residential street. The pub was done up in that 'modern day' decor (polished floor, cream walls, dark wood bar and a real fire) but lacked something to tip it into the 'nice and welcoming' bracket. It was 1pm and the place was a bit empty. The lager was flat as a witch's tit (no offence you!) and the food on the blackboard was a bit expensive for a back street boozer. I think the place was aiming for the Hoxtonites, with their club flyers and dj decks under their arms, but should maybe erect some blinds at the windows, get some fruit machines and aim for the older folk in the streets surrounding it. The houses near the pub were in the half-a-mill bracket so are hardly where your average scruffy Shoreditch Twat would live. Tempting but could be disastrous.
The second pub was in Borough. What a dump! (Borough, not the pub). Who would buy a loft conversion for 600 grand directly opposite a huge ugly rough-as-guts housing estate? Morons, thats who. The pub was deserted and we were the first customers that day. Apparently, just a year ago, it was a thriving, vibrant local gay boozer but then the brewery let Linda Barker loose on it's walls and furniture and now the only thing in there is tumbleweed and out of date alcopops. The gays now gaze at that pub through the windows of the boozer over the road which has welcomed their pink pennies into its smoky, carpeted and warm hearth. Schadenfreude or what? We shan't be preparing a business plan for this one (though I'm quite sure the brewery would sell it for tuppence if anyone thought they could revive it from its death rattle).