Monday 23 March 2009

The Cru*ch

I work in a pub. And we are banned from using the double C word. Not the C word, mind, that we can use freely i presume, there is no memo on that. But there is a memo about the double C word.

To be honest, I hate this term and I would love to know who came up with it so that I could throw stones at them. It fits into the category of the 'baby boomers', terms that will live with us forever. I am so tired of it and wonder why we can't all call it the 'recession' like normal people in time gone by when it happened before.

I always thought that the pub trade would never die during a recession. People would always go to the pub and maybe even drown their sorrows and the UK would see a rise in number of alcoholics, with pub landlords driving Lamborghini's.

In reality? We are doing just as badly as everyone else. There was a hope that all of the rich people in the UK who dined at The Fat Duck every night (and didn't have food poisoning) would downgrade a bit and come to us. This has happened to an extent - we've had some very interesting posh customers who look as though they are worried they are going to catch something from an East End builder.

But this isn't enough and the future looks bleak for all of us. As a fellow pub owner's daughter expressed recently, we can only hope that we will have a bloody glorious summer and people will seek out the pubs in an effort to recreate the summer holiday abroad that they can't afford this year.