Wasn't there a pub here once?

One by one they are disappearing. The bolthole of the wayward, the weary and the downright thirsty; the refuge of the lonely, the gregarious, the henpecked husband and the hopeful Jack-the-lad. Yes, it's the local pub . . . being sold off, cast off and brassed off at an alarming rate of something like forty-odd a week. If only greedy, shortsighted brewery executives and spineless local authorities would fizzle away up their own cellar pipes at the same speed we might gain some respite.

The closure of a public house and the subsequent granting of planning permission for the siting of a new housing project is getting mighty tiresome as well as disrespectfully quick. Now when a customer goes outside for a smoke he could well find that the place has been flogged off while he was fiddling with his roll-up. How many small communities have suffered the loss of their only pub in recent times? Often, local residents have attempted to stave off the building of new houses that inevitably follows as soon as the dust of demolition has been blown into the distance on the back of a wind of sad resignation. Their efforts almost always fail. They are told by councillors (those high priests of social psychology) that their lives will be enriched by new faces and new families. They never seem to be told the hard fact that very few people talk to each other these days unless they meet in a local drinking establishment, where they can't cross the road to avoid each other.

So, as we move into this liberated and enlightened era of smokers lighting up outside in the non-drinking area while one man and his non-smoking dog are inside at the bar, and the For Sale sign obliterates the view of the hand-painted masterpiece, villagers old and new may be forgiven for asking each other one question: "Can I get a drink around here or is the war still on?"