Harry's Blog

I recently found a local pub I rather like. The bar staff are friendly and attractive, the beer good and the general ambience being of a traditional oak-beamed tavern.

In short I like it quite a lot. So I've frequently pottered down there a few times in recent weeks to enjoy a couple of pints after work and read a book in a friendly atmosphere.

What makes this pub especially entertaining though is a regular that sits at one end of the bar and seems a permanent fixture, he's certainly been there every time I've been in.

He's clearly a retired gentleman of some breeding, an upper class amiable old fellow that has the bearing of a man who has served in the military. He is very much the retired elderly gentleman officer.

And it's worth going to this pub just to hear, when the pub is quiet, what he talks about to whoever's eye he has caught. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making fun of him, he's just got an amusing turn of phrase and sounds like a character from an entirely different age.

Last night he was talking about cigarettes and the impending ban of smoking in English pubs. He informed his interlocutor that while he never had time for smoking himself, he felt that it was a shame that the liberties of smokers were being curtailed.

More interesting though were his thoughts on cigarettes themself. He said that before the sixties tobacco smoke smelt very different, a much more pleasing odour, that did not stick or linger. Nor did he think this old tobacco actually did any harm and it was the modern cigarette, pumped full of nasty chemicals, that made people ill.

All this was related in an impeccable, but slightly tipsy, upper class clipped accent. Now both my grandfathers died before my time, but if I imagined what a grandfather should be like – it was the General.

Most refreshing is that I've not heard him utter a word of bigotry, something that is all too uncommon here in this part of Essex where middle-class racism is the norm, he's not even talked about when he fought the massed ranks of fuzzie wuzzies in the battle of Umbongo Gorge.