The Pub

There’s a good pub up the road, it’s my local. Well when I say ‘good’ I use the term advisedly. It’s not really a nice place to go because it’s a dump – it should have been condemned ages ago even years ago and they should have shut it down. It’s the worst pub you could ever hope to visit. The decor doesn’t look like it’s been cleaned for a hundred years and the carpets are all sticky and ripped up, worn and frayed. The toilets are not worth going into and if you did, you might not ever come out. You can smell the urinals throughout the whole pub – it’s really quite powerful – the smell. Still it’s a good place to go and drink some cheap Fosters or some other lager – a good place to escape to and if you like sports they have that on those wide screen flat screen TV thingys. There’s a pool table as well and that gets used, there’s a dartboard and a couple of those fruit machines that you put coins into hoping you might get them back or more of them back if you win. There’s a jukebox with all the usual shitty selections and the banter in the place is pretty depressing if you decide to eavesdrop on some of the conversations. It’s a hardcore working man’s South East London pub full of brickies, plasterers, sparks, louts, layabouts, unemployed, blokes (and a few girlies) running away from something or somebody (the wife maybe, the kids perhaps) and we go there. It’s one of those places that hasn’t changed or gone with the flow. It hasn’t been turned into a gastro pub and it’s still of the people, by the people and for the people. You know the sort, real salt of the earth stuff. If they don’t live round here they live in Eltham or in one of the council flats littered throughout Honor Oak. There’s always the flag of St George up if England play and just 2 weeks ago they had her maj stuck up over a window which was shattered, the cracks magically being held in place by Liz. So the regulars repair your toilet, fix your wall, paint your ceiling and build your fence and support Milwall FC. Slogan: “No one likes us, and we don’t care”. End of story.