Lowlife 80 – The Seadog's Magic Winkle - Part 3

The Seadog's Magic Winkle -Part 3

By Dominic Horton

In the last two episodes of Lowlife I have illuminated you about the secret, inner life of working in a petrol station (called PMG Forecourts) in the West Midlands when I was a teenager in the 1980's. This week the story continues...............

An Austin 1100 by request of Toby In-Tents

One of the other attributes needed to be a successful forecourt cashier was the ability to sniff out and execute a variety of fiddles in order to make a few quid to supplement the meagre wages. The first exposure I had to the Seadog's web of swindles was when I was a part-time member of staff and I was restocking the shelves of the shop with goods. I brought out a box of containers of oil from the store room and innocently started to put them on the shelves. The Seadog hurried instructed me, “No, don't put those out, there's no oil in the cans, only water.” The box was apparently secretly marked to show that the cans only contained water and not oil. The Seadog explained that he used the oil for his own car but then filled the cans up with water so it would appear that they contained oil. The can would be put back in the stock room, so all would seem in order if Head Office did a stock take. It later became clear to me that half of the oil containers in the stock cupboard were full of tap water.

The oil cans were not the only items of stock that actually contained tap water instead of what was supposed to be in the container, according to the product label. At the time bottled spring water was in its infancy; well, least ways in the West Midlands it was, it had probably been sold in London for the last two decades. The majority of bottled water that we sold was bought by the salesmen in the car showroom that was adjacent to the petrol station and was part of the same business. 

An artist's impression of PMG Forecourts in the 1980's.

The salesmen liked the bottled water as they mistakenly thought that it made them look cool and at the cutting edge of fashion. What they didn't know was that the bottles actually contained tap water as the Seadog and I used to take empty, discarded bottles out of the bin and refill them at the tap and sell them on again. We had discovered that the bottled water had no seal on the screw-top lid, so it was impossible to tell if the bottle had been used before. Each bottle we sold was 100% profit for us, so it was a good little earner. One of the salesman, Nobby, even commented on how much better the water tasted than tap water. Eventually the bottles developed a seal, so the great spring water scam eventually went down the drain.

Like prison, snout (cigarettes) was the standard currency for the fiddles that were mutually beneficial to the cashier and the customer. In those days receipts for petrol were hand written chitties so a customer who had £10 worth of petrol might ask for a petrol receipt for £13.60 to give to his employer and he would pocket twenty fags and so would the cashier. The oblivious employer would think that the £13.60 was accounted for wholly by petrol. Some employers would issue their drivers with special fuel credit cards which technically they could only buy petrol with, but again we would allow customers to buy whatever goods they wanted on the card as long as there was twenty cigarettes in it for us. You didn't actually have to take your cut in snout, you could just take cash to the same value.

Monster Munch

A lot of our sharp practices involved the stock in one way or another and we had a lot of room for manoeuvre in this regard as our daily stock take was manual and the till was as old as the hills and you had to reckon up everything in your head. So we had serious reservations when we were told one day by Walker from Head Office that a new till was to be installed which would modernise everything and automate the stock taking process. Each item sold was supposed to be individually input into the till and it would add everything up for you and even tell you how much change you had to give each customer.

After the new till was installed the fella went to great lengths to explain to the Seadog how it worked and what functions it could perform to make our lives easier. But I could tell that the Seadog was paying no attention whatsoever to the man as for the majority of the time he was smoking a fag and starring out of the window. Once the man had gone I asked the Seadog to show me how the till worked but all he said was “press the button that reads '10 Benson & Hedges' and press 'Enter' and the till will open and that's all you need to know.” We carried on with our old methods of carrying out all procedures manually, thereby protecting the latitude we needed to fiddle a few pennies.

The Seadog was in charge of ordering the stock for the shop and as far as the perishable foodstuffs was concerned he had to strike the fine balance of holding enough to keep the shelves stocked but not too much as it might go out of date. Despite the Seadog's skill and experience one time two boxes of Monster Munch crisps went over the use by date and in order to shift them he was given clearance by Head Office to sell them at half price. Seeing the chance of making a few shillings he tippexed out the date on the crisps and carefully wrote in a new one, sold them at full price anyway and pocketed the difference.

Conversely we actually encouraged the best sandwiches to go out of date by hiding them behind cans of pop in the fridge so customers did not see them. When we saw Salmonella Sid the sandwich man pull onto the forecourt we used to take our sandwiches of choice out of hiding and put them to the front of the fridge. Sid would breezily say, “here we are lads, you might as well have these ones as they are out of date and I am only going to throw them away. Nothing wrong with them if you eat them today, waste not want not.” And they say there is no such thing as a free lunch.

We were always keen to make a quick buck so when Head Office wanted us to raffle off twelve turkeys to attract business we thought it was Christmas. In fact it was Christmas. A turkey was the be raffled off once a day for a dozen days in the build up to Christmas and we were instructed to issue customers with free raffle tickets with each purchase of petrol. Foolishly Head Office left the draws entirely under our supervision so it was no surprise that the Seadog and I and the rest of the staff “won” a turkey each with some bagging two; we fabricated bogus names for the winners so no foul (or fowl) play was suspected. We did at least show some festive spirit and we ensured that an impoverished elderly customer called Old Norman (who used to put a fiver's worth of petrol into his Austin 1100) walked off with a bird. He was astounded when we told him that he had won as he said that he didn't even have a ticket.

Another elderly customer, who was affluent, was not so lucky and she used to come off the wrong end of a shakedown which I always thought was morally dubious. But the Seadog convinced me that we were simply playing Robin Hood and re-distributing money from the rich to the poor (i.e. us.) The victim was in her eighties and she had a brand new white Mercedes and lived alone in a massive house down the way and she was clearly loaded. When she pulled onto the forecourt the Seadog would rush out and ask her if she would like him to fill the car up, which was a personal service that we didn't offer to any other customer. As soon as The Seadog had finished filling up he would give me the nod and I would press the button on the till that cleared the display on the pump back to “£000.00”, so the lady didn't have a clue how much petrol she had bought. The Seadog would always add a fiver onto the price and she would happily pay up there and then, not even having had to get out of the car. The customer was so pleased with the service that she received that she even used to give the Seadog a tip and shamefully he used to accept it.

Given the above, my advice to you is that the next time you go to the petrol station make sure the seal has not been broken on your bottle of water and if the till is being manned by a seafaring type with a drooping moustache and a Dorset accent then drive on by. Unless you want a dodgy receipt of course.

© Dominic Horton, July 2014.

* EMAIL: lordhofr@gmail.com.

Lowlife 79 – The Seadog's Magic Winkle – Part 2

The Seadog's Magic Winkle – Part 2

By Dominic Horton

Last week in episode 78 I illuminated you about the secret, inner life of working in a petrol station (called PMG Forecourts) in the West Midlands when I was a teenager in the 1980's. This week the story continues...............

In addition to the full-time employees of the Seadog, Ashers and me there was a veritable army of part-time staff as at least two people were needed to man operations and the Seadog didn't work evenings, Saturday afternoons or Sundays. I met Hugh Queensbury, Still-in-Fjord, Alexander Sutcliffe and Dustin Scoffman at PMG as they all worked as part-timers and they have remained as close cronies of mine ever since. The best friendships are formed in adversity, or so they say.

Eek, now a senior analyst on Russia & the former Soviet Union

Another lad worked there called Eek but I didn't work with him much and he kept his distance from our social group, which was a wise move on his part and served him well, as free from our frivolity he later went on to greatness, becoming Russian correspondent for the BBC, whereas the rest of us have ended up as average Joes (or in my case sub-average.)

The main skill needed to be a forecourt cashier or assistant was to have the ability to fend off boredom, which would creep upon you from every angle and engulf you if one was not vigilant enough. When I was on the till and accompanied by a part-timer I was effectively in charge so between the two of us we had free rein to undertake things to entertain ourselves, which we especially needed to do in the evenings as after rush hour there was only a sporadic trickle of customers. Spending vacuous hours having to amuse ourselves in the confines of the shop felt like association time in prison, except we were actually getting paid for it.

Some of our preferred activities in the evenings were watching television on an old black and white portable set, playing cards or dice cricket (or actual cricket on the forecourt in the summer) or playing the tedious Cliff, Elvis and Beatles game, which consisted of us listening to The Cliff, Elvis and Beatles Show on Beacon Radio and trying to guess which of the three legendary artists would be singing the next track.

Benny Hill as Dickie Davies by request of Toby In-Tents

One of the duties of the part-timers was to clean the male, female and disabled toilets. Cleaning the disabled toilet was impossible as it was cleverly disguised as a store room and was crammed full of stock. A customer once caused a mini crisis as he actually asked to use the disabled toilet, which was unprecedented, but he was quite insistent telling us about his rights etc. We had to clear a gangway to the karsi by clearing out a load of gardening products that deterred pests, such as Cat Off and Slug Off but the customer got fed up waiting and ironically he bogged off.

I suspected that some of the part-timers used to sneak pornographic magazines into the toilets and read them leaning on their mop until they were interrupted by a customer, whence they would hide the literature with great haste in the same way that Benny Hill did when the camera fell on him and he was doing his impersonation of Dickie Davies in World of Sport mode.

I thought about the aforementioned a few years ago when visiting an award winning public lavatory in the Somerset town of Clevedon. The ageing attendant not only took great pride in keeping the conveniences spotlessly clean but he also put relatively tasteful soft porn pictures on the walls of the Gents so men could enjoy them whilst having a pee in the urinals. If I were a betting man I would hazard a guess that if I visited Clevedon today that the titillating pictures in the Gents have been taken down by order of the killjoy Council and that the toilets are now a sh*thole (literally) on account of the attendant having to man three dozen municipal toilets in the area due to local authority cutbacks.

Scoffers, enjoying his retirement from deathball

Anyway, a customer named Brendan would have thought all of his Christmases had come at once if he had walked into the PMG toilets and been greeted by the sight of mop wielding youth. Brendan was in his 60's and was an odd character with strange rust coloured hair, a walking stick and a stiff neck. Brendan rarely bought petrol, or anything else for that matter, but he used to wander into the forecourt shop for a chat, accompanied by a small, yappy dog. Brendan had a vague family connection with the Seadog's wife Pat so even though he was a nuisance we had to humour him and we couldn't simply insist that he leave the shop.

When I joined PMG the Seadog warned me that Brendan was a predatory pervert and if he was given half a chance he would strike, so under no circumstances was he to be invited behind the counter or into the room beyond, which was out of sight of the shop. The Seadog explained that the last time Brendan had got behind the counter he had used his stick and canine companion to corral a member of staff named Pete Shotton into the oil cupboard, in a One Man and His Dog style manoeuvre, and turned the key in the door, locking poor Shotton in with him in the confined room. When the Seadog became aware of the commotion he rushed to the oil cupboard. When he unlocked the door he found bottles of Castrol GTX all over the place and that Shotton was trembling violently and had gone as white as a sheet, a pallor that he has retained to this day. Brendan once touched my arm so I threatened him and after that fortunately he left me alone.

I used to work with Scoffman on Tuesday evenings and for some reason he was initially wary of me and he used to sit in the back room on his own, so sitting at at the till I used to pass the time by reading vociferously and it was then that I first read one of the books I cherish most, On The Road by Jack Kerouac. In the pacey book Kerouac breathlessly chronicles his exciting adventures travelling the breadth and length of America with Neal Cassady and others encountering drugs, bepop jazz and the hippest people; the irony was not lost of me that I was sitting motionless on my back side in a dreary petrol station in the West Midlands in an occupation that was on the extreme margins of sedentariness, which if documented by me would have been entitled On My Arse.

Eventually I won Scoffman over with my charms and he warmed to me and we quickly became good friends. I used to look forward to my Tuesday shift more than any other as Scoffers and I invented an electrifying game that was like a vicious version of baseball, which we called deathball. We used to play the game in the shop and the aim of the batsman was to knock stock off the shelves to score points, each stock item having an allocated points total. The ball was a tightly packaged amount of paper wrapped in several layers of electrical tape, so it was a ferocious little projectile and as the pitcher stood only a few yards away from the batsman the game was fraught with danger for the pitcher. The most points were scored by knocking packets of fags off the cigarette stand but as this was behind the pitcher's head one often saw the ball flying at one's face from only a few feet away. Afraid that one of us would lose an eye safety measures were introduced and therein-after the pitcher had to put a small wicker basket over his face, which provided the required protection but still allowed enough vision to see the batsman.

Professional footballers often eulogise about the euphoric feeling when they score a goal but there was no greater sporting adrenaline rush than catching the deathball sweetly on the meat of the bat to see it go hurtling over the pitcher's wicker safety mask and crash into the cigarette stand, sending half a dozen packets of Embassy No 6 flying around the shop. When Embassy decided to discontinue making No 6 a punter came into the shop and asked to buy our entire stock of the product but we had less packets of the cigarettes than was recorded on the stock ledger due to a fiddle we had going on, which was one of many. But more of that and other forecourt frolics next time as I am sure that I have filled you up with enough tomfoolery to keep your motor running for another week.

© Dominic Horton, July 2014.

* EMAIL: lordhofr@gmail.com.

Lowlife 78 – The Seadog's Magic Winkle (Part 1)

The Seadog's Magic Winkle (Part 1)

By Dominic Horton

After cutting my losses and quitting my paper round (see Lowlife 64) my next career move as a teenager was to work for PMG Forecourts at the their petrol station in Quinton. To begin with I was employed as a part-time forecourt assistant and my duties were to clean the pumps, be a general dogsbody, making tea and the like, and to talk to the full-time members of staff to stop them dying from boredom. For this I was paid the princely sum of £1 an hour and you could easily fritter away your wages by buying snack foods just to pass the meandering time away. I have little recollection as to how I got the job but I think it was through a lad called Wearmouth who was a Davie Bowie nut but looked like he was a member of the band The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Gerry Gow

The boss was Sandy the Seadog and the big boss was Walker, who was a doppelgänger for Ian Richardson, the actor who starred in the BBC political thriller House of Cards. (Incidentally, I see that the Yankees have remade the series recently; they just can't keep their money grabbing hands off our best films and TV shows, remaking them instead of writing their own stuff). The Seadog was in charge of the forecourt on a day to day basis and Walker was a suit from Head Office who would pop in once a day to collect the takings from the safe, which was supposed to be locked at all times but when the Seadog was absent and a full-timer called Ashers was in charge the safe was mostly left unlocked through negligence. Security was hardly the watchword at PMG.

Walker always seemed a bit nervous when he turned up as I think he viewed us Forecourt workers as an earthy and rum lot and although he passed the time of day with us he couldn't wait to scuttle off in his posh motor back to the comforts of the surroundings of Head Office, which was a mythical place as none of us had ever actually been there.

Rose used from Head Office used to telephone once a day to get the sales figures and we used to flirt and have a general banter with her and we all pictured her to be young and highly attractive and we never considered for one minute that she was otherwise. Months later the Seadog was summoned to Head Office for some reason or another and when he returned we were all crushed when he told us that Rose was knocking on a bit and highly obese but he consoled himself by pilfering a number of items off Walker's desk when the big boss wasn't looking. From then on once we had given Rose the sales figures we made our excuses and cut the telephone calls short. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

The Seadog is from Lyme Regis in Dorset and he is one of those characters who is a dead ringer for many people, including Freddie Boswell from Bread, the Bristol City 70's/ 80's footballer Gerry Gow and a down-at-heel Des Lynam. He used to be a fisherman and more than anything he longed to return to the high seas, so being stuck in a petrol station in the West Midlands was just about the most un-nautical existence he could have possibly hoped for.

Ivan Mauger by request of Toby In-Tents

The Seadog ended up living in the Midlands after meeting his wife Pat, but by the time I joined PMG the marriage seemed less than ideal and he would escape back to Lyme Regis whenever he could. His kids were called Sam and Ivan and they were named after the speedway riders Sam Ermolenko and Ivan Mauger. Speedway had been big when Sam and Ivan were born but by that time its popularity was fading quicker than the Seadog's enthusiasm for his marriage.

The Seadog always superstitiously carried with him a winkle from Lyme Bay and he used to fret if he had forgotten to put it in his trouser pocket when he dressed in the morning. He believed that the winkle had magic properties and that one day it would see him restored to his rightful place, sailing in the English channel catching fish a plenty.

The Seadog rarely served on the till as it was manned by other full-timers and his duties only took up about 20% of his working hours, so he mostly idled his time away by smoking, dreaming of seafaring and drawing moustaches on photographs of women in the daily newspapers. He probably had the most sedentary job in Britain, even taking into account Gazza's former 'aid' Jimmy Five Bellies Gardner, who's only physical activity was walking to the bar and back. Instead of doing something useful with his time he used to get himself into a deep malaise and bore himself into a mind numbing stupor, to such a degree that when his shift ended he could barely raise the enthusiasm to haul himself off his stool to go home.

Georgie Fame

Other than the Seadog and Ashers the only other full-timer was the Wild Man of Brummio, who was a large fella with Meatloaf looks who was often surly and obtuse to customers. But the Wild Man had a bit of nous and being a boozer he had a keen sense of pub humour so I used to get on with him. After a while the Wild Man went on long term sick leave for what the Seadog thought was chronic malingering but was officially diagnosed as a bad back. Being the longest serving part-timer I was asked if I wanted to fill the void left by the Wild Man and work his shifts on a pro tem basis and I gratefully accepted with pound signs in my eyes.

At the time I was officially supposed to be attending college full-time as an A Level student but my devotion to academia had severely waned and I was barely attending classes. I didn't really mix with the other kids there and I was a bit of a loner. I was summoned by the college to see the attendance officer Mr F, who looked so much like Georgie Fame that when I entered his office I thought that he was going to burst into an impromptu rendition of “Yeh! Yeh!” Instead Mr F sat me down and smiling warmly he said, “I know you don't want to waste your time at this meeting Horton and if the truth be known neither do I. It is up to you to decide if you want to attend classes, you are an adult now and you make your own decisions. But I need to keep you here for at least fifteen minutes to make it look like we have had a proper meeting. Do you take sugar in your tea?” At this he made a cuppa and gave it to me with a biscuit and we leisurely talked about football for a quarter of an hour. I regarded the sham meeting as effectively being clearance for me to take up full-time work at PMG and reap the rich rewards of extra beer money.

Working full-time meant that I no longer had to work with the other full-time cashier Ashers as he and I would work opposite shifts to each other, covering all of the opening hours between us, so our paths only crossed when the shifts changed. Ashers was a strange but likeable character who had one gammy eye that was constantly on the move, uncontrollably rotating in all directions like a manic disco light. He used to drink foul chicory weed coffee and he wouldn't let us listen to the racing on the antiquated Invicta radio as he used to video tape race meetings and watch them late at night when he got home from his shifts.

All the part-time staff liked Ashers because if they couldn't be bothered doing their designated tasks he would do them instead, so he would scrub the forecourt with the putrid, fishy smelling cleaning fluid through fear of getting a boll*cking from the Seadog that the job had not been done. Ashers was too kind hearted to tell the part-time staff to get off their ar*es and do their jobs themselves so they just used to loaf around when they worked with him.

Although Ashers was probably in his 40's his Mom used to look after him and having always lived with his parents he didn't have the wherewithal to care for himself. One time Ashers's parents abandoned him by going on holiday for a week and his worried Mother cooked him a meal for each of the seven days and bunged them in the freezer, so all he had to do was cook them in the microwave. Each meal was labelled with a day of the week.

He was fretting when he came into work one day and when I asked him what was up he said, “Mom hasn't left me a meal with a label on it saying 'WEDNESDAY'.” The Seadog suggested to Ashers that he pops up the chippy for his tea and Ashers confessed in all seriousness that he hadn't thought of that. But even this ludicrousness was usurped by another food based incident when a robber held up the petrol station and threatened Ashers with a Double Decker chocolate bar. Given his poor eyesight Ashers thought he was being threatened with a knife or a gun instead of a piece of harmless confectionery. Fortunately Ashers had locked the safe for once so the thief only got away with the minimal amount of money that was in the till and a few packets of fags. And of course a Double Decker.

Next week: The Seadog's Magic Winkle (Part 2)

© Dominic Horton, July 2014.

* EMAIL: lordhofr@gmail.com

Lowlife 77 – A Maze with no Exit

A Maze with no Exit

By Dominic Horton

As part of my redundancy package I was referred to an employment advice firm who will use all of their expertise and know how to help me find a suitable job. This week I had my first session with an advisor from the firm, an hour long telephone meeting. Among many other things the advisor told me that if I want to be successful in obtaining employment that I have to develop a 'brand'. It makes me sound like a packet of fags; fitting, as this gizza job lark is a right old drag and my CV has gone up in smoke as the advisor said I'd be better off not just revising it but starting from scratch.

The Pirate, the Author & Harry Stottle, by request of Toby In-Tents

I said to the advisor I thought that only people like David Beckham have a brand but she said no anyone can have one. The advisor and I discussed all sorts of things and she left me a lot of tasks to get my teeth into, which is just as well as my brand is probably about as popular as Luis Suarez's is right now. As least during the call the advisor didn't use the words “scrapheap”, “unemployable” or say “you have anxiety disorder? If I were you mate I would apply for disability living allowance because in all honesty there is more chance of Rolf Harris being granted day release from prison to play his didgeridoo in infant schools than you getting a job.”

The advisor enlightened me with the fact that the vast majority of jobs these days are gained through networking. When I think of networking in my mind's eye I see a lot of be-suited executives in a cordoned off area of a hotel bar, drinking white wine and eating canopies, chatting and mingling, pretending to like each other for the sake of their careers when in actuality they hate each others guts and would much rather be down the local at the quiz night. Dreadful, soul destroying stuff.

Luis Suarez

But the advisor said, no, networking can mean a whole host of things, as long as you are communicating to others (by any means) that you are looking for a job and telling them what your qualities and skills are then it is networking. Telling people what an ambitious, driven and talented person I am would be mere bluff and bluster but if I do it in the public bar of my preferred networking venue of the Flagon & Gorses then, according to the advisor, it will count as invaluable work towards gaining employment. And the inmates of the Flagon are more than used to hearing such bullsh*t as it is part and parcel of bar-room talk and pub life.

I am not gifted at the kind of self promotion and delusion that is necessary these days to be successful in hoodwinking a prospective employer into welcoming me into their firm. Smoke and mirrors has never been my thing and it never will be. Of course I will earnestly try to create an attractive curriculum vitae and to impress in an interview (if anyone is foolhardy enough to give me one) but the rules of the job hunt game are more than likely to overwhelm me as like the rules of the game of life itself they are complex and elusive.

No one ever tells you the rules of the game of life so you just have to pick them up by yourself as you go along. And it is a difficult, challenging game with complicated regulations which can frequently change without any prior notice. You are born and it is a case of 'just get on with it'. As a child nobody really prepares you for adulthood and if anyone tried to it would be most likely be futile as you have to go into it headlong by yourself and learn by your own mistakes and experiences.

The Grim Reaper

Whether life is a game or not is up for philosophical discussion. Maybe I should ask my crony Harry Stottle to adjudicate on the matter in the Flagon & Gorses. But to me life feels more like a club, of which I am not a member. And when I apply to join I keep getting rejected. A riddle with no meaning, a maze with no exit. As I've seemingly been thrown into this world by mistake I long to go to the parallel world where I will feel comfortable and at ease.

If someone has similarly been erroneously thrown into my parallel world instead of this Earth then maybe a swap could be organised, like an exchange of prisoners between parties at war. A swap of any sort involving a person always seems to be conducted in a disused and derelict warehouse by a defunct dock. At the hand over the officials of the parallel world will undoubtedly say, “hang on a minute, we are not having him, before we know it he will be writing all sorts of nonsense in a weekly blog and upsetting our harmonious apple cart. You can have the trouble making f*cker back.” I would be back in the Flagon & Gorses by tea time with my tail between my legs and a pint of bitter in my hand.

Pub life allows its players to escape, suspend or even deny the reality of things but even the steady flow of booze is not enough to fend off the ultimate truth that we are all going to die. In the end King Canute could not turn back the tide. But when the Grim Reaper comes along to undertake his grisly duly you might as well be three sheets to the wind. Reality has no place in a public house. If reality approaches the bar for a pint it is given short shrift. “Who are you?” “I'm Escapism, can I have a large G & T please?” “No you are not, you are Reality, I am not going to serve you, get out, we have told you before that we don't want you in here.”

No one talks about heavy drinking and its harmful effects for instance. Oh no, that talk is not for us squire, not today, not tomorrow, not any time. Tell humorous anecdotes about drunken escapades by all means but don't become all serious and analytical about it. Just laugh it off and have another drink. And when your glass is empty have another and another until it is time to go and you are catapulted out into the night to dash off home before reality catches up with you and taps you on the shoulder.

But at least if you are lucky you will have had enough drink to get to sleep so you can drift off into another type of uneasy oblivion. Until reality ungraciously wakes you in the morning and stares into your bleary, bloodshot eyes from an inch away, whispering the menacing words, “remember me do you? You can run all you want dear friend, but try as you might you cannot hide. I will hunt you down and find you in the end. Always.”

Barty Hook, Lowlife's London correspondent, informed me this week that pub going as a way of life is more prevalent in the West Midlands than down in the Smoke, where things are a bit more cosmopolitan. In the West Midlands if men meet socially to do anything that does not involve alcohol it is mostly seen as odd or even downright wrong. It is of course acceptable to undertake an activity that is preceded by, followed with or involves alcohol such as going for a curry, playing football or fishing (if the activity is sport based all the better) but without booze being included somewhere in the equation it would be viewed as suspicious. Two men having a lunchtime pint who decide to also have a cob each is fine; men meeting for lunch is not, as it is considered effeminate and therefore objectionable. Attitudes among younger people in the locality may be more liberal and less Draconian but many of my peers still hold a “traditional” outlook.

I was having a mid afternoon cup of tea in a café the other day, waiting to pick my dear son Kenteke up from school, when a group of twentysomething lads walked in to have a coffee and a chat and good on them. To the mind of the traditionalist this behaviour is of course improper as any time after lunch should be strictly pub territory. Men enjoying bacon and eggs and a cup of tea the morning after a skin full is fine whereas an afternoon “catch up” over an cappuccino is not.

I suppose that over time that traditional male attitudes to socialising and drinking and the like will change (for the better) but some things are best left as they are. Civilisation as we know it would unquestionably jolt to a sudden halt if ever I walk into the Flagon & Gorses late afternoon and see the Pirate daintily sprinkling chocolate powder over his fancy skinny latte.

© Dominic Horton, July 2014.

* EMAIL: lordhofr@gmail.com.