Oh no, it's improved

For months now, I have been saying that I will not set foot inside the pub for quite some time when it eventually reopens. "Maybe I will pop in around Christmas", is what I have been telling anyone asking me about plans.

Yesterday I was driving into town when my phone went mad, ringing four times in two minutes. At the red lights I checked to see who was so eager to get hold of me. It was my regular drinking partner of old - he in the photo. Then I remembered - it was Thursday.

As I drove past the pub I saw old friends being greeted at the open door by my favourite bar wench, so I parked in the nearest space and went straight there.

Yesterday was 'soft opening' (we all like them) day when the pub tested its Covid-secure system on willing guinea pigs like me, before the hard opening (we don't like those) on Saturday when the chavs are allowed in. The bar wench commented that - far from staying away until a few others had succumbed to a horrible death - I was inside with a beer in front of me in under quarter of an hour of the doors being opened.

The really terrible thing is that it has been vastly improved. In the past it was often a struggle to find an empty stool which was not next to a standard-issue bar-bore who leaned in too close, breathing his reeking life story 12 inches away from your face, but now you are greeted at the door and allocated your own personal seat and nobody else is allowed to get closer than 6 feet of you.

Another bar wench comes up to you and takes your order, then relays it to another bar wench who pours it, then hands it back to the serving wench who brings it to you on a tray, having taken your card payment at arms length. Also in the old days, you sometimes had to wait five or more minutes to get the attention of one of the three or four wenches who were busy chatting to friends or choosing music out the back, but now you have the sole attention of at least two of them as soon as you step over the threshold.

The place has been given a deep clean, the doors are open and they have stripped the walls of the hundreds of out-of-date posters, postcards and irrelevant clippings which have cluttered them up for over 25 years. Prior to closure, if anything was stuck on a wall it became history overnight and gained the sacrosanct status of a listed object. 

I say 'the terrible thing' because - having lost all my clients - I really cannot afford to pop in every night as I used to. Oh well, I don't want to go back to the old ways in any case. (Sob...)