The Out Of Town, Ripley.

I like a pint. 

Always have done. I have enjoyed a pint or two since I was old enough to get inside a pub, in the days before the draconian ID policies of the modern era (which force kids onto moonlit parks without any adult supervision at all, but that's another story). 

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When I do drink, I don't drink at home at all. I enjoy going out. Nothing worse than the same four walls, is there?

I have a real ale thing going at the moment. 

It used to be endless lager in my football days and cider in the days after my stomach's machinery failed me, but now, I stick to the ale - which is not always easy, as a lot of it tastes like its been warm filtered through a tramp's sleeping bag. 

It always breaks my heart, therefore, to see a pub close. 

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Two weeks ago, the Dorset Arms in Compton Acres shut its doors for good. 

My family had many a decent meal there on Sundays and birthdays. My brother and I would disappear for a bet at the neighbouring Mark Jarvis bookies in between the abyssal gap separating the starter and the main course; the beer would flow. 

We spent my Dad's last birthday there, and most of the family had a mini-wake in the deep, tangerine sunshine, a shocked impromptu anti-commemoration, two days after his passing in July this year. 

It was heartbreaking to get an email informing us of the Dorset's closure and even sadder to see it shut down last Saturday - the colourful logos pulled down, the lights dimmed, the umbrellas and tables removed from outside. 

It's closure was also the final straw for the bookies next door too. 

That shut last Saturday afternoon.

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I spent many a Saturday afternoon in there watching the racing with some hardy regulars. It was clean. It was quiet. The staff were friendly and it had a conspicuous absence of the nutters and machine-addicts you get in Nottingham city bookies. 

And, of course, when you lose a pub, you lose the pub-bookie pub bookie merchants. You lose the cash flow. You lose the interest. 

A butterfly beating its wings in Brazil causes a tornado in Tokyo and the same rules apply when you shut a pub. The takeaway will be next. 

And the curry house.

Sooner or later, you're left with Scope and Cancer Research; pre-loved jeans which smell of mothballs and the steamer.

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There's the emotion to consider too. 

Pubs inspire memories of togetherness and community and personal reflection of family and friends. I have many, many great memories of friendships and conversations and parties and great nights spent in pubs. I'll never forget them. 

So many of the pubs I have memories of have metamorphosised into soulless flats, unethical car washes and completely unnecessary mini-markets.

You must all have a favourite pub which has gone forever. 

In the past decade, I've lost the Druids Tavern in Arnold (the first place I ever had a pint - 34p a pint of Home Ales Mild), The Fountain, QE and Dog and Bear in town (which I wrote about in UV); the Quorn in Sherwood (so many wonderful memories in there, the Latin Quarter); the Dumbles in Southwell (the first pint I ever had up there in the sticks), and now the Dorset. 

The Quorn Hotel in Sherwood - now a block of student flats

All gone. All empty. 

Spectres, ghosts; haunted spirits.

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I'm writing about this because I have a good friend whose local pub, the only pub in her village, shut last night - a focal point for absolutely everything from food, writing groups to Zumba in the summer garden. 

Then, I found out an hour later, via a text from my son, that they are shutting the Out Of Town in Ripley tomorrow night, a pub I have never visited, but for some reason, a pub I felt passionate enough about to have made the subject of a short story.

That really upset me.

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The short story, "Pop Up Comedy Night", was published last year by Clare Stevens and her team of writers at Maggies at Nottingham City Hospital. 

I was inspired to write it after my son, who lives in Ripley, told me about the pub's desperate struggles to attract drinkers and how it fought valiantly to stay alive. 

The pub went down every route it could to attract the passing trade it most desperately needed, in the face of severe competition from the Wetherspoons close by, and five years after my son told me about the infamous comedy event, the disastrous comedy night I wrote about in the short story, it's now all over. 

The struggle is over.
The Out of Town is out.

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You can substitute the name of this pub  - a pub I have never visited, a pub I only know about secondhand - for one of your own. 

It's all a symbol. 

It's all Jungian. The individual parts don't matter. 

Every pub shut in this country, even the rank bad ones, jolts the interconnectivity, the psychic network which connects each and every one of us, both to each other and to our historical culture.

It's all a group memory, an archetype.

You all must know a ghost pub: Enough have gone, most never to return.

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Why am I writing this? Well firstly, because I can. 

Secondly, 

All these pubs would have survived if we actually used them. 

These great community venues, these sources of friendship and memories, of great emotional satisfaction.  

These histories in brick.

It would have been simple.

A pint bought. A round to celebrate a birthday. A bag of pork scratchings and a pickled egg. A quid in the jukebox, fifty pence in the Batman fruit machine, the odd frame of pool.

It would have all helped.

But what did we do instead?

We went to a stinky Wetherspoons for the cheap beer and the ping breakfasts.

But it's cheap beer, intit, Marky. 

Or we stayed at home talking to pixelated strangers on Facebook, digital signatures in faraway places. people we'll never meet. 

Or we stayed in to watch some shit BBC drama about bent coppers written by some middle class non-entity who uses Prosecco-and-Lobster bars on Salford Quays.

Or something. 

Who knows. I'm no expert. I'm just upset.

Bottom line - we didn't use the pub that shut down last week. The Dorset. The Out of Town. 

We're all to blame.

End of.

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I'm not preaching from on high. I don't go out as much as I used to. I'm tired and depressed most of the time from work, travel, crowding, a sense of frustration with the wider world and an underlying anxiety about the future.  

I could sleep for England and I'm sure I'm not alone. Of course, when you are asleep, you aren't in the pub, you aren't spending money and neither is anyone else, because they are all asleep too.

When pubs are gone, most stay gone. It can cost a fortune to resurrect a pub. So entrepreneurs don't bother, especially in the suburbs. 

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One day, we're going to wake up and all the pubs will be gone. 

And then what would we do.

Mark

1) I promise the next blog I write will be cheerful.

2) Missing Pieces may be out on e-book shortly. Only Joe Hill, incidentally, has attracted a wider audience than the launch event for Missing Pieces did at Nottingham Waterstones, including some big names.