Small Children In The Background.

Isn't is funny how fast the time goes? We're already into August - the summer (all two days we've had of it) will be coming to a close and soon we will be back to glorious Autumn. Then it'll be Christmas again, then - if the last few years are anything to go by - we'll probably have Spring sometime after. It is particularly hard to believe that an entire week has passed since our manager broke his leg - in an astonishing demonstration of brainlessness, Henry Ginn broke his leg after falling through the flimsy roof of our exterior loading bay (ironically, this happened as he was demonstrating its robustness). Now it should probably be noted that Henry is not a young man - he has been smoking and drinking for fifty years as if the two vices (or, indeed, his pulse) could be rescinded by some higher power at any moment; his liver works overtime almost every weekend, and he smokes unfiltered cigarettes as if trying to turn his lungs into such an uninhabitable environment that not even a tumour would dare set up camp in them - the man's not exactly the poster boy for a healthy lifestyle; he's old-school, so much so that he predates the fairly aged misspelling of "old-skool". No hangovers, no coughs, the man could probably breathe comfortably in a distillation column, but his bones are evidently not immune from his own tomfoolery, as his shinbone got snapped like a twig after he fell through the loading bay roof.

Although he wasn't exactly crippled - we didn't even need a relief manager; the leg was put in a cast from the knee down and he was sent home the same day with a pair of crutches, ready to resume his previous position. He promptly handed these in at reception; his heart belonged to another mode of transport. You can imagine our surprise when Frances called us at the hospital (much to Henry's consternation, she jumped in the back of the ambulance at the last minute and accompanied him for the entire exhaust-scraping journey to the infirmary) to tell us he was more or less fine, only for her to push him into the lounge on four wheels.

"Bloody hell, Christopher Reeve." Eddie despises staff gatherings of any sort so this dramatic roll-in entrance was just more fuel on the fire.
"Very funny Edward," grumped Henry, getting out of the wheelchair temporarily to remove his coat, leading us to believe he probably didn't need this wheelchair (but had probably commandeered it from somebody who actually did need it all the same). "But you're all going to have to do a lot more around here now that I'm disabled. So you'd better get used to it."
"Are you kidding? It's a break, you can still walk on it!", interrupted Christine, who is still not really 'down' with our way of doing things. It's considered bad form to interrupt Henry when he's giving one of his speeches, as more often than not he loses his place and is forced to start over.
"No I'm not kidding," said Henry, proving his pain and suffering by grabbing his pen and whacking his cast with it repeatedly. "See that? I can't be running this place like this. Now, where was I..." and he started over.

The jist of his long-winded exposition was that now he had been disabled for life (e.g. injured for a few weeks) the entire body of staff would now have to bend so far over backwards to help him that, ironically, we would probably all wind up crippling ourselves. However, in a stunt pulled clean from the pages of Nineteen Eight-Four, Henry would not be relinquishing executive authority over the premises - he would execute his will through the newly-installed intercom system and the forthcoming CCTV system.

CCTV is something that has been considered for this place before; however, if our infamous 2006 robbery wouldn't convince the company to get a bit of surveillance on the go, I doubt Henry's bumbling incompetence is going to loosen the purse-strings, hijacked wheelchair or no. The reason we don't have a CCTV system in place already is simple - the company absolutely positively refuses to spend money on this place unless failing to do so will result in a death. Robberies? Whatever. We've even been instructed on how to open the till in the event of an armed robbery so we can hand over the takings with a minimum of fuss/bullets (which is just as well, as I was planning to do that anyway; it's good to know that they realize we're not paid quite enough to consider taking a dose of gunpowder surprise in order to protect a few measly coins). But apparently, Henry needs the place to look like a reality TV show (in which case the next order of business is to hire a pack of sniveling, dribbling wretches, a handful of 'weirdos' to spice things up, and then sell the pub to Endemol so that people can text into a premium rate service in order to vote me and Eddie out of a job - Davina McCall can host it, we'll make a fortune) so he'll be popping in to plead his case ASAP. Best of luck to him.

"Right, if there's no further business, you and Ed are on the bar, Elaine's in the kitchen, alright?" He enquired. I assured him this time-tested arrangement - which has covered hundreds of mornings in the past - is unlikely to fall down just because he fell through a sheet of plywood.

"Good, because I don't expect to be disturbed now that I'm disabled. You two are more than capable anyway," Henry then hit his makeshift gavel (his coffee cup) on the desk, wiped the coffee off his hand, and wheeled himself out, leaving us to begin the day. Shouldn't be a problem, we thought, but of course it wasn't to be that simple. Let me tell you something, if there's only one pub in your area and you fancy popping down for a pint and a pie, why not give them a ring and book a table? Because unless you are the only person who ever uses that pub, a hundred other people may have the same idea, as they did on Wednesday. Before you know it, every fair-weather punter notices that the weather is, actually, fair, and decides to march to the village pub to eat and drink their own body weight until the clouds begin to encroach across the sky once more, at which point they up sticks and piss off quicker than you can say "can I take your plates?". It's the only village where every house is a life-sized weatherhouse, and the little people only venture out of their doors if the sun is out.

Naturally, when Henry is down on the floor, getting in our way and dicking about with the punters, things couldn't be better, but now he's hobbled off into the distance (once more throwing his legitimacy as a wheelchair user into disrepute as he got out of it and carried it up the stairs to the flat with ease when he thought Eddie wasn't looking - the first thing I did upon getting home was to get on the computer and order a Stannah brochure to be sent to Henry, which I hope he will enjoy perusing at his leisure) the place is packed out, two barrels need tapping and would you look at that, the bar till has no pound coins in it because everyone's paying with fucking notes. Ed and I have experienced true horror; we survived the Christmas Eve massacre of 2006 and lived to blog the tale. So stress isn't the word I'd use, it was just the annoyance of every possible minor inconvenience ganging up on you all at once. It happens every once in a while, but seemingly only occurs when I'm stuck behind the bar like a lemon, explaining that the spike is stuck in the old cask so there'll be no more mild until we can dislodge it, and apologizing for our shortage of sliced lemons.

It's strange - you can walk the same tightrope every single day without a hiccup, but the day you take the safety net away you realize how much you depend on it. And Henry is a safety net around here - I wondered if this was a good thing or a bad thing. As much as Stephen had been a fuck-awful manager - whose presence couldn't have had any less effect on the day-to-day operations of the pub had he been replaced at some point with a life-sized cardboard cutout of himself - he taught us something (as a result of teaching us absolutely nothing); how to run the pub on our own. But as Henry came in and asserted dominance, we all fell out of the habit of running the place. Henry came along, and before you know it, things are getting done. You go in the cellar to tap the barrels and sure enough they've all been pegged and the empties taken out. You go to paint over that unfortunate graffiti in the toilets only to discover that Henry has beaten you to it, long before half the village could be informed that Bonzo Shagged Donny's Missus Behind The Fox & Hound. Soon enough, we all fell out of the habit of fending for ourselves, as the wolves that raised us had a tranquilizer dart blown up their ass by head office huntsmen, and a human was sent to liberate us from our barbarian past. But before I really had the chance to really consider my long-lost skills, we had run out of change and I didn't have the keys to the safe. Time to buzz Big Brother.

"HELLO?" The new telephone system makes everybody's voice approximately seven octaves lower than its natural pitch, meaning Henry sounded like some sort of omnipresent Barry White (although the connection, for some reason, isn't the best in terms of quality - if you buy your internal telephone system at a shop called "Everthing's [sic] a Quid" you get what you pay for, unfortunately - so it's omnipresent Barry White, on a mobile phone going under a tunnel that just happens to be completely submerged).
"Hello, I need some change, we've got sod all down here."
"I'll go to the bank tomorrow."

I had to take a step back and think about this. We need change... so he's offering to go to the bank... tomorrow. It took me a while but eventually I realized that a difference of opinion had emerged regarding the severity of the change issue. This was hardly a satisfactory answer, I felt. In fact, it wasn't even an answer - he may as well have just rattled a tambourine and burped down the line for all his answer helped me. We were now at the point where change of a £20 note (for a £2.10 pint of Bitter) came back to you with a tenner, a fiver, two fifty pence pieces, and so much copper you could quite easily melt it all down and attempt a pretty adventurous metalwork project (I intend to build a statue of myself on the village green wearing a crown and a cape to signify my sovereignty over the village's alcohol supply). So naturally, this situation could not go on indefinitely; we needed change, and lots of it.

"Henry, we need change now."
"We don't have any." This was close, but it wasn't the answer I wanted. Now I know how Roy Walker felt.
"Well then what, might I ask, am I supposed to do?" I asked. At this point, Eddie quietly leaned over and put him on speakerphone. The bar abandoned the television and the dartboard in favour of the home-grown entertainment on offer from the staff.
"Oh, I don't know," Barry White spluttered. "I'm about to go in the bath. I tried to have a shower but the cast got all wet." Henry may have guessed by now that he was not speaking exclusively to us, as the bar went up with a roar of laughter.
"Hey, Darth Vader," called the captain of the shooting team. "Get them some change for fuck's sake, if I fall in the river on the way home with all this change in my pocket I'm a fuckin' goner." The green light on the phone disappeared; Henry had turned the intercom off, conceding defeat in the face of insurmountable lumps of common sense.
"Fine. Take a twenty out of each till and go and get some change from Mike the Shop." I plucked Edward Elgar and Adam Smith from their respective clips and within two minutes (ten seconds of which was spent attempting to wake Mike the Shop, who has actually operating a "knock if you want something" policy, such is the nature of his business - or lack thereof - hence why I spent a few seconds hammering on the glass to awake him from his slumber, perched on a stool with his head balanced on a mop) we had pound coins to burn.

But I came back to a pub that seemed eerily quiet - the pub had lots of people in it, both inside and out due to sunshine and cigarettes, but there was just this feeling, this intangible something that led me to believe we were still waiting for the guest of honour. Some real premier league arseholes, gold-standard cock-knockers whose mere presence in a pub is enough to cloud the room in a dusky hue of pomposity and arrogance. Then I realized what it was; the bar had its usual pricks in it, but the lounge was relatively free of irritants. The bar was currently housing the village's resident BNP fanclub, a group of older gentlemen who pore over the Daily Express and express frank and utter dismay at the state of Britain ("look at that Trevor - 'Gordon Brown burns Queen Mother's deathbed using petrol bought off gypsy asylum seeker queers' - country's gone to the dogs, I'm moving to Spain"). These people blaze a red, white and blue (you know, the other red white and blue) trail into the pub every day with a copy of the self-proclaimed "best newspaper in the world" under their arm, shocked and appalled by every sordid tale of political correctness gone mad and foreign imposition. If you take some time to study The Daily Express, as I have, what strikes me as most interesting is the picture of a crusader, in full chainmail getup, looking off into the distance in the paper's top logo - presumably wondering in disbelief why political ideas from his day and age are still being given a sincere audience in modern civilized society. I would ban them all, but that would be a kind of fascism, albeit on a smaller scale, so I decide instead to suffer their presence. They don't come in all that often.

And anyway, I had bigger fish to fry, as our bar-to-lounge prick ratio was soon settled.

Luckily for everybody, the kind of people who next crossed our doorstep don't come in all that often either - I turned to see a couple, in their early thirties, standing at the bar in the lounge. How did I know they were there? Luckily, the "gentleman" - who, between evening classes on how to turn repugnancy of character into a skilled art, clearly spent all his time pickling himself in a bath of cheap aftershave, because the stuff absolutely stunk the room out - had decided to inform me of his arrival by picking up an empty glass off a table and hammering it on the bar.

Dnk dnk dnk dnk dnk dnk dnk, it went, each tap putting a dull thud in my ear and a small dent in the bar. With that, I assumed my best diplomacy face as Eddie and I advanced on them. It's so satisfying coming to work every single day and dealing with people who assume we are so dangerously incompetent that we are physically incapable of regular verbal communication, so the only way to get your needs attended is to keep your instructions simple - bang a glass to get our intention, and when we hobble over, hunch-backed and slobbering, point at what you want otherwise we will almost certainly misunderstand you. Somebody once asked me for a pint of Carlsberg and a bottle of Corona (with a fucking lime in the neck!) and I spent several weeks in hospital.

"Cut that out," Eddie instructed Glassbanger, but I could see from the get-go we could have trouble on our hands. Not that our hands weren't big enough, because Glassbanger was approximately two feet tall (OK, maybe not, but he was pretty short - Ronnie Corbett might have been able to comfortably stand behind him at a concert). Sadly for him, he was also four feet wide, going a bit bald on top but decided on a rather stylish combover, had the top two buttons of his shirt undone to reveal a rather lovely combination of gigantic gold chain on farmer's tan, and had obviously spent a considerable amount of his fortune (the bulk of which had probably been leprechaun gold that he inherited from his parents) pumping his wife's face so chock full of botox that she was left with merely one expressible emotion - slight constipation. And I've seen this configuration a million times before - short man complex, tries to drink his own weight in Guinness and then goes off on one, causing trouble before somebody has to pick him up be the scruff of his arse and flick him back to the end of his rainbow.

"Have I got to sit out there all fucking day or is somebody going to come and take our order?" Apparently Glassbanger had seen this little old-fashioned village pub in the middle of some inbred, flaming-torch town and had brought unrealistic service expectations to the table (once wifey had helped him onto his chair).
"No Vez, leave it," screamed his wife as if fearing for our lives, all the while her face cosmetically paralyzed into a state of perpetual disinterest. The contrast was jarring.
"Do you want to watch your language, mate?" I enquired of Glassbanger.
"Oh aye, not good enough to come outside and take my fuckin' order, but all of a sudden I've got to watch my fuckin' table manners is it?"
"Well," I began, my conflict management training leaving me sorely ill-equipped to deal with men like 'Vez'. "First of all, we don't take orders from tables, if you want to order food you have to come to the bar to do it. And I was only asking you to be mindful of your language because this is a family establishment and you have your kids with you."

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention - he had his kids with him. I didn't notice them at first, because they had zipped off into the lounge and were putting their fingers in somebody's lasagna while they read their paper, yelling, running around, and generally making the place look like a creche (I can't remember what their names were - some reprehensible modern Americanism like Tyler or Bubba no doubt - so I simply referred to them as Grotter and Mucus). Grotter and Mucus were everywhere - they made so much noise that I think even the dumb waiter would have told them to can the yapping (had Mother Emotionless not curbed her walking Ritalin prescriptions with a clout that seemed perhaps a bit too sharp for a "warning shot"). I'm still not sure how I feel about kids in pubs - on one hand, I'm all for showing children that it's an adult activity that must be approached sensibly, but on the other grubby, sticky hand, that never happens. Ever. People like Glassbanger see pubs as yet another playground - this is a place where old men come to drink cask ale and complain about how everything these days is so expensive and (despite polio and the like) the life of the 1950s was that of a king. If you're bringing your kids to a pub and you yourself are an irresponsible prick with a wife who looks like she stared Medusa herself square in the eye and won, then naturally you're going to get questions like:

"Dad, can I have a Fosters?"

I looked at Vez, intrigued at what he'd do next. I didn't think Grotter was joking - I doubt Grotter even had the capacity to joke, he had probably traded that in, alongside his ability to love, in exchange for a Nintendo DS and the cheek of old Nick.

"Ho ho... kids," he chuckled, suddenly giving the impression that he didn't hate us after all, giving us the cue to laugh it up. "I'll have a pint of Fosters." He then turned to Grotter and Mucus so that his face was completely invisible to us, and asked in a very deliberate manner...

"What would you like boys?" Me and Eddie began to smell a rat, but thought nothing off this peculiar behaviour at the time.
"Lemonade," came the general consensus.
"Fair enough. Two halves of lemonade, and a small house red for Julie." Well, you can hardly afford to turn your wife into something out of the Madame Tussaud's B-sides catalogue if you're splashing out on large wines, or anything with a shred of reputation or brand identity (you can't fault the company's house offering, simply called "Le Wine" - "Le Wine", despite the French connotations, is from South Africa and is apparently, in terms of the taste sensation, halfway between drinking pure antifreeze and being punched in the face by an angry South African vineyard keeper, presumably angry because he has had to squeeze more pennies than grapes to meet the margins). "And to eat, we'll have more or less everything you've got." (Well, he didn't say that, but they were big orders - the nippers were given no head start by daddy as they were given a pair of steaks so big that you'd be hard pressed to believe we got them from a land mammal, and not, say, a blue whale).

The order went through, and we parted ways. We heard Elaine swearing vehemently at the printer - I would truly hate to be a full-time cook because I'm yet to meet one who actually enjoys cooking - and then we forgot all about it, leaving it in her more than capable hands.

Elaine buzzed through to the bar to signify the food was ready - I was busy trying to write a dirty word in the head of somebody's Guinness, so Eddie decided to ferry the scolding hot plates of food over to the mewling little bastards, who apparently missed the episode of Sesame Street where Big Bird tells them not to play "let's jump around in an erratic and unpredictable fashion" when there are plates overheard so hot that one slip of the hand could result in an impromptu Junior Simon Weston Lookalike Competition. However, Eddie maintained a firm grip on the blazing hot plates and got them to their destination without a single singe. He did, however, have a concern.

"Might want to come and have a look at this."

I went over, expecting to see Vez had grown tired of waiting for his meal and had simply cracked open Grotter and Mucus' ribs, feasting on their vital organs like a vulture in a bad suit, but no, the concern was more table-based. As Vez, the mannequin and the nippers all looked at us, Eddie pointed at the drinks in front of the young guns - Vez's lager was empty, but the two boys' lemonades had taken a slightly golden yellow hue. That, and they each had a gigantic head on them from where Vez had poured the beer in without thinking. Eddie and I took the drinks - Vez nearly choked on his own disgust (and a bit of the whole rotisserie chicken he ordered and was, at that point, eating with his bare hands).

"What the fuck d'you think you're playing at?" sputtered Vez, clearly completely and utterly oblivious to why we might be confiscating the alcohol he had sneaked over to his prepubescent scrotes.
"We're not having underage drinking in this pub, if you don't like it you can go somewhere else."
"What, you think I can't buy my kids a drink do you? They're allowed alcohol if they're eating." And there it is, that age-old misconception. There seems to be a bit of confusion around the law in this area - if you're over 16, a parent or guardian can buy you beer, wine or cider with a table meal. The law does not cover supplying lager to an eight and ten-year-old. But it's such a gray area with so many interpretations and pitfalls that I think you'd be hard pressed to find a pub that would do it (that loophole was aimed mainly at restaurants who do drink as a secondary item to the food, not pubs like ours who do the complete opposite). It was not designed for the vertically challenged to turn his boys into men via the medium of flat, piss-weak shandy while they feast on a veritable sackful of what had once been majestic Welsh farm animals. Eddie gave me the nod; it was time to go and get Ironside. Sadly, I was left to engage in a dialogue with Vez and co, which pretty soon fell into the gutter in terms of content and tone.

"You lot have got a fucking cheek," blurted Vez, coating me in a very thin layer of spit and the roasted, spiced carcass of a farm hen.
"No Vez, stop! Stop!" shrieked his wife with a face full of nothing, as if any minute he would remove the tent that he so tastefully converted into a jacket, roll up his sleeping bag sleeves and invite me to step outside to settle this with the time-tested exchange of opinion known as fisticuffs. Grotter, clearly innately troubled by the incident playing out before him, began to pick his nose.
"Look," I began, at this point bored of remaining civil and now just wanting to end this fucking mess as soon as possible. "If you don't like the law, write to your MP. Don't fucking take it out on us."
"Mind your language," snided Vez.

"What the hell's going on here?" And here comes Henry, being wheeled into the circle of conflict by a visibly shaken Eddie. I wish I could tell you at this point that we came out with a tirade of put-downs and witticisms that would make the cumulative efforts of Churchill, Wilde and Fry look like half-wit internet messageboard exchanges. But OMFG, no such thing happened - the argument was not won with words.

"What's the problem here?" enquired Henry.
"Well, I've been trying to explain to -" at this point, Vez turned to Henry and fell silent. His wife let out a shocked gasp, Grotter pulled his finger out of his nose and I thought Mucus was going to weep into his meal.
"What? What part of the age laws don't you get, mate?"
Vez said nothing.
"If you fancy crossing swords with me pal, I'll have the rozzers down here before you can say blink, alright?"
"Fine."
"What was that?"
"Fine, sorry, fine."
"I think you owe my boys an apology."
"Sorry, sorry. Look, are we alright?"
"We're fine mate. Don't make me come down here again."
"Believe me, I won't."

With that, Vez - evidently just wanting to get rid of Henry as soon as possible - turned and resumed eating, as did the rest of his posse, the children quivering slightly (you could actually see the moment they became scarred for life; their faces sort of crumpled a bit and stayed that way, and they made this little whimpering noise that sounded like thousands of pounds being handed over to a therapist in later life). Although how they managed to eat another bite after seeing a bath-soaked Henry wheeled in front of them - wearing nothing but a (loose-fitting) bath robe and a slightly soggy cast on his leg - is something that has escaped me to this day.