5 days ago
JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: My round? Sorry if I sound mean, but with beer at £5 a pint I fear it may now be every man for himself
Anyone conversant with pub culture will know the kind. This breed of drinker knows who they are too – shameless freeloaders. Some of them even admit as much with a chuckle.
They are Tam, perched on his stool at The Clansman in the Scottish sitcom Still Game – ever thirsty, ever eyeing opportunities for others to finance the quenching.
I've known many Tams and, on occasion, have become more fixated than I should in the course of an evening down the boozer on their modus operandi.
I can't let it go. How can they do this to their friends? Why so sleekit? Where is their sense of honour?
I am talking about the ones who disappear to the loo when they sense the next round of drinks is looming and return, minutes later, to find their next pint waiting for them. 'Oh, grand. Cheers everyone.'
The ones who quaff away for hours at their companions' expense and then, as expectant eyes turn to them, suddenly remember there's somewhere they have to be.
'Later, chaps. First round's on me next time.'
I've seen them finally cornered and marvelled at their gall as they ask if anyone can spot them 20 quid to get the next round in.
We have all met a character like Tam from sitcom Still Game, who constantly tries to avoid paying for a drink
I've watched that twenty cross the table – sometimes it has even come from my wallet – to land in the pub leech's paw, and I've known in that second the donor will never see it again.
The cardinal rule of my nights spent in licensed establishments was never to be that guy. Spend more than you planned if need be. Just avoid being thought of as him.
Drink with integrity. Take the hit on a round that wasn't strictly yours to get stung for rather than allow suspicions to ferment that you are not a team player.
I was aware, of course, that this plays straight into the freeloaders' hands. They stick close to people who don't want to be like them.
This certainly, was the game as I understood it two or three decades ago when my visits to pubs were more frequent and my staying power was at its peak.
Alas, today I am struggling with the rules. Do I even want to be a team player?
The average price for a pint of beer, we learn this week, has passed the £5 mark. And that's the cheap stuff. If your mates are on Peronis or Morettis or BrewDog's Punk IPA – as those I meet in pubs invariably seem to be – we are talking upwards of £6.
That £20 note was good for six drinks or more back when I was getting in the rounds. Today it will score you three Punk IPAs and you may as well put the few pennies change in the charity box, please, barman.
In the circumstances, are rounds even still a thing? Shouldn't it be every man for themselves? What is the modern etiquette now that the sums are getting serious?
I was wondering this even as I walked in the door of a Glasgow city centre watering hole a few weeks ago. Lots of people I knew were going to be there. There was an excellent chance – because I knew them to be kind-hearted souls – that someone would offer to buy me a drink within seconds.
What is the right answer? In truth, the situation requires more investigation, but pub environments, I find, are not conducive to the over-thinking of responses to simple questions like 'do you want a drink?'
But let us, in our sobriety, over-think it here. Now, you have very generously extended to me the offer of a drink. Let me tell you my problem with that.
I've only just arrived. For all I know, you are already in a round with six or seven people. If I accept your offer then I am – according to the etiquette with which I am familiar but, admittedly, may be out of date now – subsumed into this round, which entails certain obligations on my part.
In days gone by, this would not have worried me because I was either capable of drinking six or seven pints or past caring by pint four or five.
But you will accept that times have changed. You see before you today the enfeebled husk of the drinker I once was. Let me be brutally frank: I'm out of here after pint two or three.
I hope you are beginning to see my difficulty. Suppose for a moment I were to say yes. Half an hour from now, I would be dutybound to repay your kindness with my own offer of the refreshment of your choice from the bar.
But what if Tom, Dick, Harry, John, Paul, George and Ringo have empty glasses too? In the current climate, Peronis costing what they do, my tolerance for them being what is, I would find my presumed obligation to them, as fellow members of 'the round', vexatious.
And here, friend, is the other dimension to my quandary. Long ago, when I thought I knew my way around drinking culture, I made a promise to myself that I would never be that guy – the one that I am in grave danger of becoming if I accept your hospitality, keep my head down for round two and leg it as soon as that glass is drained.
So, you see, I am caught on the horns of a moral and financial dilemma. You ask me if I want a drink. I say that is far too complicated a question for a guy who has just walked in the door.
If I know anything about pubs, it is that the drinker you assaulted with this stream of verbiage would have started talking to somebody else – anybody else – five minutes ago.
So, actually, what I said was: 'No thanks, you're fine, mate. I'll get my own. I'm only staying for a couple.'
But might the dawn of the £5 and £6 pint be an appropriate juncture to give the more ponderous answer a fair hearing? Is the eyewatering expense of getting a round in – coupled with the collapse of my generation's ability to last the pace – forcing us to walk a pub protocol tightrope?
I cannot ever be Tam the sponger from Still Game and. Nor, I find, can I still be the willing dupe team player who says 'hey, who's counting anyway?' It turns out I am counting.
It was, then, with an every-man-for-himself bearing that I approached the bar and sorted myself out with a £6 Moretti. Did I feel good about it? Nope.
Did it seem churlish, petty, anti-social, an affront to the rich social culture, the sense of camaraderie that the pub round once engendered for me? Yup.
But, like I say, I no longer know how the game is played. And drink is too expensive – and I can hold too little of it – for occasional visitors like me to leave the pub with honour.
I skulked away after three or four, wondering if I should write to a problem page.
How does one negotiate a night in the pub? As the freeloader? The patsy? The standoffish loner? None of them work for me.
