Once again I find myself sitting in another hotel that has almost become synonymous with my own home where I have spent so much time here. As I start on my second pint of the evening, the first accompanying my meal for one at a well-established pub chain, I started thinking…
I guess my love affair for beer ended the day I first entered a pub legally. The first legal beer, on your eighteenth birthday, had lost its sense of anticipation after having been drinking in pubs since I was about sixteen (and maybe even before that). And not just pubs, I had regularly sneaked my way past the bouncers at the local nightclub only to pay over inflated prices for watered down drinks and have slow dances with an arched back so that girls did not catch on to your true desires - in the time honoured tradition of the adolescent male! I would roll into home at about three in the morning and get up at six to do my paper round zig-zagging my un-lit bike up the unlit main road with a headache. Why do we do it? Besides, nobody really likes the taste of beer. Life, however, is cruel and many of us succumb to the drug.
Around about the mid eighties a small plot of green belt land also succumbed to beer when a not so small village pub, run by a not so small landlord – I can never remember knowing Big Dave as anything other than Big Dave - was built in the middle of a place called Vigo. The modern day pub, unlike other surrounding village pubs that had been built using sticks and mud at around the turn of the nineteenth century, was duly fitted out with hardwearing carpet and pub furniture, and a sturdy bar. It did however manage to retain some of the nineteenth century charm with its choice of pumps, optics and cash register presumably to secure planning permission. I suspect it also came with the necessary leaky urinals offering the chance for patrons to gracefully slide across the floor before smashing their skull open on a sink. Also I would not want to cast dispersions on village life but the place did have a backwards clock. I struggled less, in the years it hung on the wall with the hands moving backwards, than I did the day it was changed for a normal clock. That really confused me casting said dispersions on my own life! Little did I know at the time, this pub some twenty five miles away from where I currently live, would become an important cornerstone in my social life or that it would be the foundation to my future career as a rock God. Okay so that last statement may be a slight exaggeration.
My own personal experience of the Villager pub kicked off around the early nineties. Now a dedicated musician … follower … I had been seeing various bands around the south east and my quest had led me to a pub in the middle of what seemed like nowhere. I wondered how a pub could thrive in such an area until a few years later I met my friend and colleague Eric, known nowadays to his friends as the Thirsty Ferret. Sure Eric’s fondness for the odd pint could keep a place like the Villager ticking over but I suspect it was not until around 2004 that shares in the place hit a high, rivalled only by shares in hotel furniture suppliers when The Who were in town, when a gentle West Country boy moved from Weston-Super-Mare to join us working in Maidstone. Pubs in Weston closed down faster than fast food outlets in East London during a Health Inspector’s convention despite Chris leaving the rest of his darts team behind. I suspect the other reason it survives is because being in the middle of nowhere everybody has to drive there and drink soft drinks – which everybody knows cost four times as much as alcohol anyway. Over the years I have subsequently been to the pub during daylight and found a substantial housing estate actually surrounds the pub.
The first visits to the Villager roughly coincided with the time I was actually not just following bands but also being in bands. Somehow, and to this day I still don’t know how, one of my first real bands managed to blag a gig. We would earn real money, although the generous offerings of Big Dave were never going to go far in a seven piece band and it was before the days of the collection jug. I suspect the tax man would still have wanted his share though given the chance. I think that technically to pay tax we needed to make a profit and after paying for equipment and petrol we were quits on that front, especially the day we turned up only to remember we had left the mixing desk at the local village hall where we practiced. The bass player and I flew back to Maidstone hoping the £600 mixer would still be there. This made a pleasant change, normally the bass player would spend the hour leading up to the start of the gig on the toilet with worry, and this day we were all on the toilet with worry. That night however we were lucky. We did get food at the end of the night and eating was always a bonus because many of us still lived like students. With the value of hindsight we were awful. A dodgy soul band modelled on The Commitments including most of the film soundtrack. If only our talent had equalled our ambition. That said, infamy can be a good thing; some thirteen years later Big Dave still comes past and says ‘Whey, Back to Front, get them back eh?’ And he did several times so we cannot have been that bad could we? Well truth be known, yes we were. The only reason we were allowed back is because we brought a considerable number of drinking friends with us to each gig and Big Dave liked big volumes of drinking customers. I have destroyed nearly all memories of the band except one; my fatherin- law still has a tee-shirt.
Of course what pub would be complete without an array of lovely barmaids? Over the years Dave has never let us down in this respect. We probably stopped going for the music years ago. The trouble is we are getting older and the barmaids are getting younger. It is only a matter of time now before Eric is locked up for perversion. He has the upper hand on Chris and myself when it comes to chatting up the newer barmaids because he knows them all – well more to the point, his daughters know them all having gone to school with most of them! It wasn’t that long ago I was chastised by Eric’s eldest daughter because of my lascivious pub habits, where do I stand morally on grassing? I would love to have graced my photographic portfolio with portraits of some of the barmaids but with good reason they have all doubted my professionalism. There are of course barmen but we have never really paid that much attention to them! Well, that is until recently when we noticed one, Calvin (not Klein or Hobbs), could actually count and was capable of not only getting the right change for us but also knew how much a drink cost without looking it up on the till. This has taken a considerable amount of stress out of buying beer.
Sadly our favourites have now gone. It was only ever going to be a matter of time what with them having real jobs that are probably better paid than our own. In one case certainly, one was more qualified to do our jobs than we were. Still they put in ten plus years of good service although, in fairness, it was only in recent years we truly appreciated them. Lou, was everything you could want in a barmaid, pretty, friendly, courteous, chatty and efficient, no sorry my mistake, that was Kerry, Lou was probably the same, just not to me. It is a well known fact that you always want most what you cannot have and there is also the old adage ‘Treat them mean, keep them keen.’ That is why despite the half filled pints, over-charging and general spurning of my advances, I loved Lou. But this was fair, Eric loved Kerry and Chris loved whoever was left! There was a status quo. Lou was always compassionate with her rejections using subtle phrases like ‘Not if the human race depended upon it.’ ‘When Hell freezes over.’ ‘Put your arm over the bar and I will break it.’ And ‘Do you understand the concept of a restraining order?’ I know some of you will say ‘But Iain, you’re married!’ to which I would say you are just being picky. Chris’s heart was broken with regular monotony because the other barmaids came and went regularly. Eric’s heart has been broken twice, firstly when Kerry went and did the stupid thing of getting married, and the second time, in common with myself, when she and Lou left the employment of Big Dave. It was a crushing blow but now with the help of some prescription Louise-O-Rette patches, I am down to a pack of twenty thoughts a day about Lou and my shrink tells me in a decade or so I should be over her completely. Eric is shallower than me and has already moved on to the next barmaid and yes you’ve guessed it … the first time he saw her was at a school open evening.Despite the disappointments we continue to frequent the Villager and prop up the corner of the bar. We do this because we are the only punters capable of asking for the key and locking the trophy cabinet when the band causes it to vibrate open. It has nothing to do with the fact that is the end where the sink is and the barmaids have to come there a lot during the course of the evening. We have not been fazed by the increased prices to cover the cost of the new pumps (due to the old ones not being Twenty-first century compliant) and the new chip an pin technology allowing us to buy beer with plastic – no more does John, another of our little bunch and fellow band member, cash cheques over the bar although those curly cables can be a bit springy when you are drunk and let go of the keypad. Who knows how much a pint would have gone up by if Big Dave had invested in a wireless machine? Our little clan continues to outlast the pumps, numerous barmaids and the slippery toilet floor but sadly I don’t think any of us will live to see the carpet replaced!