TAP ROOM

When I was sixteen years old, I took a trip to Leeds where my brother John was attending university and where I was to follow him a couple of years later. That year my brother was sharing a house with (amongst others) our inspirational friend Rob Aslett. Close to their house in Woodhouse was a pub called The Chemic on Johnson Street. This was an exciting time for me. I was away from my parents for perhaps the first time, and was expecting to have myself some mighty fun.

On a Saturday lunchtime, John, Rob and I took a stroll down to The Chemic to partake in some not at all well-earned liquid refreshment. I am not sure whether The Chemic is still like this, but at the time there were two sections to the pub: the lounge and the tap room. Before they all got turned into trendy open-plan bars with carpets, duke boxes which cost £1 for 2 songs and shiny metal rails at the bottom of the bar (what are they for?), quite a lot of pubs had this two-room arrangement. The lounge was normally the more plushly furnished of the two rooms. The tap room was usually a pretty basic affair with a stone or wooden floor, benches around the walls with adjacent tables, a few wooden stools in front of these tables, and two or three high wooden stools next to the bar. The high stools were for those who didn't like to venture too far away from the bar in case they wasted some very valuable supping time.

On this occasion we decided to go into the tap room and as there were three high bar-stools there, we settled ourselves next to the bar and ordered ourselves a pint each. This turned out to be a remarkable experience I would never forget. Sat in the tap room already were three elderly Yorkshiremen. With what seemed like a built-in ability to do geometrical calculation, they had sat themselves as far away from each other as they could possibly get. Each man sat in silence, staring into his pint. It was almost like walking into a cathedral. It felt like we ought to keep our voices to a whisper as a mark of respect.

Then every few minutes one of the men would call over to another.

"How's your Irene?" One would say, not taking his eyes off his pint for a moment.

"She's not so bad, Frank. Not so bad." The other would reply. Then both would nod their heads knowingly and return to the silence again for many minutes.

Some time after we arrived, another old man arrived. While he was at the bar, the other three men automatically shifted their positions in the room so as to make it possible for the newcomer to fit into a new perfect geometrical pattern, so that with four of them now present, each was still as far away from the other three as it was possible to get.



"Hey up," said the newcomer as he turned from the bar and went to take his seat.

"George," the others said in unison and then the silence resumed as George took his seat and commenced his ale meditation.

As I look back on this experience I feel a sense of sorrow that most pubs have been refurbished in recent years. One seldom comes across a genuine tap room any more. It really was as if this was a sacred ritual for these men. The one place they could come to find a bit of peace and solitude, to be alone with their thoughts, free from the cares of the world for a couple of hours. None of them seemed hell-bent on getting plastered as seems to be the case with my generation and those that have followed it. You might say there was a deep serenity to what they were doing.

It seems a shame that the spending power of the younger generations means that if they want to find peace and solitude, these men might now have to resort to going to a church, where everyone knows you can't get a decent pint of Tetley's.