My belated reading over the break = this mournful piece about the great English pub die-off—penned, in an apt twist, by The Economist’s obituaries editor. Crabby and disgruntled and sad and great. “All these notions, severally and together, may help pubs to survive. But which Britain is being saved here? The model often seems to be the golden age of coaching, immortalised by Dickens, when pubs seethed to the bustle of horses, ostlers, serving maids and calls for peppered lamb chops; or, alternatively, some rural idyll of cricketers, oaks and village green. But pubs, despite a pickled tendency, are also mirrors of their times. Those that best reflect modern Britain, with its rapidly morphing cultures and increasingly unrooted sense of itself, are probably those that boast metal advertising boards, quiz machines, pad thai and stock antique photographs of people unknown to anyone; the Wetherspoon’s that calls itself the Willow Tree Walk, when the sooty tree outside it is a birch.”

My belated reading over the break = this mournful piece about the great English pub die-off—penned, in an apt twist, by The Economist’s obituaries editor. Crabby and disgruntled and sad and great.

“All these notions, severally and together, may help pubs to survive. But which Britain is being saved here? The model often seems to be the golden age of coaching, immortalised by Dickens, when pubs seethed to the bustle of horses, ostlers, serving maids and calls for peppered lamb chops; or, alternatively, some rural idyll of cricketers, oaks and village green. But pubs, despite a pickled tendency, are also mirrors of their times. Those that best reflect modern Britain, with its rapidly morphing cultures and increasingly unrooted sense of itself, are probably those that boast metal advertising boards, quiz machines, pad thai and stock antique photographs of people unknown to anyone; the Wetherspoon’s that calls itself the Willow Tree Walk, when the sooty tree outside it is a birch.”