Another one bites the dust!

"Long time, no blog", but with the relatively good summer most of our time has been spent at Selsey relaxing in the sun and generally doing not much at all!

I have however spent a lot of time researching the history of The Fox Inn and surrounding area for thefoxfarnborough.co.uk which will be related in due course. 

But, with another birthday fast approaching and the big Seven-Oh looming ever closer, I felt the urge to put fingers to keyboard once again.

Any plans that I might have been hatching for staging a big 70th birthday celebration at the same venue as my last big party have already been shattered.

The Old Courthouse in Cove, scene of my 50th birthday party some 18 years ago has been acquired by the Fred Cohen organisation and turned into a Tesco Express.

Originally called The Anchor, it had The Alma immediately next to it and The Tradesman Arms opposite.

In those days a pub crawl in Cove could be successfully completed by covering less than 50 yards - a few pints warm up in The Tradesmans, followed by a 25 yard stumble across the main road to the Alma for 3 or 4 more and finally a 20 yard crawl to The Anchor until throwing out time. The Alma was demolished to make way for the car park of the Old Courthouse.

Like it or not inns and public houses are part of the English heritage and it is such a shame that so many of these historic buildings are disappearing from our cities, towns and villages.

It would appear that many old inns and pubs are not listed buildings giving the breweries carte blanche to carry out tasteless "re-modelling" of the interiors and the addition of hideously ugly appendages, whenever the mood takes them thus totally destroying the character of the building. And, when the novelty wears off and the local customers have been driven away by the ridiculous hike in the price of a pint, the building is sold off for redevelopment.

The price of a pint is a subject close to my heart - why should there be such a huge variance in price between one pub and another in the same area? The Welsh Bard and I often exchange texts on the subject of where we are and a particularly low or high pint price.

On the Oldies last trip to Oxford we graced three new establishments with our presence, one of which was The Head of the River in which the price of a pint of bitter (London Pride) was £3.95. Fortunately it was John G's round and he was not amused!

We were constantly hassled for a food order so drank up swiftly, walked a few hundred yards up the road towards the city centre and entered The Honey Pot where I paid nearly a pound less a pint. Once again, John G was not amused. 

I suppose at the end of the day "you pay your money and you take your chance" and if a landlord/brewery just wants to milk the tourists and have no local or return trade it's their choice.

Personally I don't like getting ripped off and, in The Head of River, had I been on my own, would have left the pint on the bar and gone somewhere else without paying!

However, the public house is not the only English institution in decline.

Manchester United, for so long at the top of British soccer is in total disarray. Invincible at home in the Premiership and rarely dropping a point away under Sir Alex Ferguson, things started to go rapidly downhill with the brief appearance of David Moyes and have reached an all time low since the arrival of the Louis van Gaal.

Here's what The Welsh Bard had to say about their last defeat:

Schadenfreude, moi?

In Milton Keynes there's crazy scenes -
The locals are excited:

Four nil their team has whipped the ‘cream’,
And Donned the damned United

Though Milton Keynes is full of beans,
Van Gaal feels so deflated:
The Glazers know he’ll have to go
And Moyes must be elated.

The honeymoon must end quite soon -
Success was so elusive
They’ve scarcely scored, the fans are bored,
And more and more abusive.

But here they’re mad, it’s looking bad,
They’re more and more splenetic…
So nurse, the screens, to Milton Keynes
Deliver anaesthetic.

A few weeks ago we returned to "God's Own County" and spent a most enjoyable weekend in Ipswich. We stayed in the Stoke area of Ipswich which is where my mother used to live as a child. I spent many days during the school holidays at my grandmother's house in Felaw Street which we got to by taking a rowing boat ferry across the water to avoid having to get a bus into town and another one to get out to the house.

Stoke is the old area of Ipswich close to the docks and is well described in this article my good friend (and best man) David Kindred:

www.kindred-spirit.co.uk/blog/life-over-stoke-in-ipswich

It was a weekend of nostalgia and reminiscing. As well as walking around the area and the docklands, we met up with David and his wife Anne and with my oldest chum Ian and his wife Jennifer who I had not seen for many years. I was born five doors away from and six weeks after Ian. We grew up and went to primary & grammar school together, although he was a year above me because of the cut off dates.

Together with Pete Talman, our performances of The Beatle's songs, accompanied by Dave Spiller on piano, were infamous around the Methodist Church youth club scene in the sixties!

My grandmother's house, long demolished and now a grassed play area, was next to The Steamboat Tavern which was on the waterfront. It originally also housed the ticket office for the riverboat to Felixstowe and it was here, nearly 60 years earlier, that my step granddad, Thomas Bruce, had given me my first mouthful of beer.

Tommy, you have got a lot to answer for!

Amazingly the pub has survived and whilst talking to the landlady about my family background and looking at the old pictures on the wall I discovered a photo of what appears to be celebration or an outing, possibly VE day. On further investigation I spotted Thomas Bruce in the front row (Seated far left) and my uncle Sid standing at the back. The landlady kindly gave me a copy of the photo. 

Apart from the landlady it was a mans pub in those days and heaven forbid if you went out without a shirt, tie, button hole and a hat!

The dockland area is no longer a working dock and has been cleaned up, redeveloped and renamed "The Waterfront Complex" with trendy bars and restaurants. Sadly all that remains to remind you of the old days are the railway lines and the empty, deteriorating mills and grain stores, although the character of most of the original buildings like the chandlers stores and the Customs House, has been retained.

It was to the Docks, sorry The Waterfront Complex, that we had to stumble in search of somewhere to eat on the Sunday evening, having been seriously over-served in the Steamboat Tavern. The only place open was the Pizza Express where I was charged nearly £7 for a bottle of warm Peroni.

DON'T START ME OFF!

Here's the other Tommy Bruce from 1960:


Good Grief ! I bought that single.

Hey Ho!