A night out!

The pub. To some, a place of refuge, like a blokes' community centre, to others, a gateway to a world where worries can be temporarily suspended in a fuzzy solution of alcohol and snacks, to others, simply a source of lager. What could possibly be better than a pub? Obviously, a selection of pubs, all experienced in one evening.

A pub crawl provides several vital functions for the drinker. Firstly, it shows that one is not just heading for the boozer at as early an hour as social convention will permit and drinking until all your higher brain functions are numb enough to allow you to discuss the merits of the latest season of 'Top Gear' without irony and with every sign of enjoyment, it also reduces the amount one drinks in an evening, principally because even in this age of GPS, Google Maps, smartphones and route planners, the fourth pub is always 'around here somewhere', that is, one street to the left or right of the one you thought it was in. Finally, it provides one with a trajectory for the evening, allowing one to compare notes on beer, atmosphere and seating arrangements. The unspoken rule is never to admit that the place you started off in was the best place you visited all evening and the smart thing to do would have been simply to dig in there.

And what better place to start than a traditional boozah. And how can you tell it's traditional, because it has some sort of stuffed animal in it, or at least a portion of a stuffed animal, that's how. There may well be pubs where it's considered bad form to have a stuffed animal somewhere in the bar, or even worse form to have the stuffed animal dressed up and, for instance, playing a musical instrument or undertaking a trade or pastime, for instance being posed as a cobbler, or Morris dancer, but as a rule of thumb the beer is going to be better in a pub with stuffed fox head in it, especially if that fox head has a stuffed bird dangling from its jaws.


This is a reminder, should anyone object, that foxes are vermin and the numbers need to be kept down, and the most efficient way of doing that is to get around thirty members of the upper classes to chase them across she countryside for four hours and then set a pack of hounds on them. Simply putting down poisoned bait is not considered environmentally sound.

History does not record how the stuffed bird met its end. Possibly mistakenly pecking at poisoned bait.

An evening of drinking is generally a great idea in principle, but in practice is likely to see you keel over at a certain point unless you have something to eat. Drinking tacticians may already have taken care of this by having the traditional finger of kit-kat before heading out, but in case you have not had an opportunity to line the stomach, this is she time to take advantage of bar snacks.

Ideally, this should be something filling and greasy. This is why pork scratchings are the ideal pub snack. Salty, savoury, tasty and packed with all the starchy fatty nutrients that will not only give you the energy to keep going until closing time, but will give you something to blame morning after quese upon.


Do not,whatever you do and no matter how drunk you get, ever have a pickled egg. Pickled eggs float in their enormous jar at the end of the bar like a horror in a mad scientist's laboratory floating in formaldehyde and will be about as good for you when you eat them. As a general rule, if anything you are doing in a pub draws an inquisitive crowd, stop doing it. This especially applies to eating a pickled egg.

Finally, at some point you are going to have to visit the pub loo. Once you've finished, acceptable methods of drying hands are; back of jeans, paper towel. Never ever use the communal towel. The last bloke to wipe his paws on it might have a job in a germ warfare lab, or KFC.