I was spending some time in the ancestral lands and I needed to have a drink. My first stop was a pub called The Thatchers. Now, as much as the naming of this pub recognises the trade of thatching for rooves, I prefer its old name which was The Wagon and Horses. How else does the name of the road nearby, Wagon Mead, make sense? Also, the name was changed a few years post Thatcher as prime minister and I always hated the pub for that. I’d been there a few times in my youth but this was the first time for many years. I was struggling to choose what to drink so I thought I’d settle for an amoretto and cranberry juice – a drink that reminds me of good times. The pub had no cranberry juice, like what the fuck? So, I settled for a straight JD.
I left the pub and was going to head back to my sleeping quarters when I decided I needed a little more walking time. I wandered along the main road, in the fog, and headed to another pub in the ancestral lands.
As I approached the White Horse I could see many halloween decorations and I could tolerate that. The pub industry needs to do what it can to keep that money flowing. Then, I noticed a sticker on the window:
Apart from that exclamation mark doing some work on the sticker, but not really making any grammatical sense I was surprised to see such an excluding sign. If you can’t make your pub welcoming to all then what the fuck are you doing? I thought about it for a short moment and then decided that these pricks didn’t deserve my money. Fuck them. I’m not suggesting that the other pub was in any way a left leaning pub. Pretty much everyone in the ancestral lands votes right wing, it’s that sort of place: large country piles easily scared by the lies of Reform and Restore. The sort of place that loves to think of itself as caring and wonderful until it sees people of a different colour. But at least The Thatchers didn’t advertise its exclusionary thoughts. The White Horse pub can go fuck itself.