I inherited this pub recently.
It’s really tiny.
It’s about four foot by four foot.
The bar’s just a small shelf along the back wall with a couple of beer taps built into it, and there’s enough space at the end for a cash register, and next to that there’s a little cubby hole which has just about enough space for a chair to fit in for whoever is working the bar that night to sit in.
Which is always me because I didn’t inherit a pub just to let someone else work there.
There’s no space to store anything else in the pub, there’s not even a sink, and everyone has to bring their own glasses with them.
I say everyone but you can only fit six people in there really, in two rows of three. Maybe eight, if everyone’s tiny and you can fit four in a row.
And you can’t be too tall, either, because the ceiling’s only six foot up.
So it’s just as well when I go in there I get to sit in the chair.
There’s a cellar under the bar for the beer barrels to go in, but you can only get down to it through an opening in the floor and the hatch is the entirety of the floor so you can only go down there when the pub is empty so if one of the barrels runs out you can’t change it until the next day.
When the pub’s open and it’s full – and it’s always full because so few people can get inside and also it’s the only pub in the town – there’s no space to move past the people by the bar to get to the bar, or the people by the door to get to the door, so what happens is all six people (or eight if they’re small) have to move around together in a loop, slowly, constantly, in unison, clockwise, like one of those puzzles where a piece is missing and you have to slide the pieces around to get them into the right place, except there’s no pieces missing, and no space, but you never stop moving. And this line moves just fast enough so that one complete rotation takes exactly the time it takes to drink one pint
It’s a bit disorientating when you’ve had a few and you’re sat on the chair serving and you’re the only one not moving and everyone else is, and because they’ve all had a few as well they think they’re not moving and you are instead, and so to them it must look like you’re some huge moon orbiting around them in the dark.
To me they look like a caterpillar that’s swallowed its own tail.
To cover the rent and the rates I have to sell about 600 pints a week, which means each person in the pub has to drink a hundred pints every week, if for accounting purposes I assume it’s always the same 6 people in the pub. Which is 14 and a quarter pints a day, which is about two pints an hour, when you take into account our opening hours, which you should, because I can’t sell pints when I’m not open (we don’t have a website).
Which doesn’t sound much, but maintaining a constant rotational speed of two pints an hour is pretty draining, and I’d say that if left to their own devices, the line would settle down to an approximate rate of about one pint per hour, give or take ten minutes or so.
To this end, I have been experimenting with different methods to raise the rotational speed to high enough levels to allow us to stay in business, but it’s quite a difficult problem.
I had hoped to effect a method of subbing people in and out of the pub with waiting customers queueing up outside, but due to the terms of our licence, and the location of our front door, and various other byelaws, there is to be no drinking on the high street, and it was discovered that without a drink in their hand people would wander off around the town and not find their way back. So this method would lead to a slow dissipation of all our clientele over the course of the night, resulting ultimately in an actual decrease in the internal rotational speed within our establishment.
So the substitution method was abandoned.
Next I tried embedding a pacemaker within the line. However, to ensure the pacemaker would maintain a high pace, it proved necessary to subsidise the cost of their drinking, meaning that the five remaining genuine customers would each then have to consume an increased number of pints, over and above the aforementioned hoped-for consumption rate. The necessary rotational speed could not be maintain.
I briefly considered putting a step between the front row of customers and the back row of customers, so as to induce a number of trips across the course of the night, leading to an equal increase in spillages, meaning pint glasses needed to be refilled at a greater rate. But this was not practical for a number of reasons, and the idea was abandoned.
One weekend I banned talking, so as to decrease the amount of time wasted on non-consumptional uses of the mouth, but christ was all that silent bloody shuffling weird.
So I let them talk.
An actual rotating floor with adjustable controls would probably be the best solution, but given the space needed for the workings of it you’d only be able to get inside if you were about four foot 6. Which would mean letting children in. And children drink pints even slower than bloody adults.
I suppose if we were letting children in we could just play musical chairs – well musical pints – and make them run around as if it was a game. A strangely expensive game.
Also, thinking about it, we’d probably be able to fit at least ten children inside, maybe even 12. So on some levels it seems like a good idea.
But then the pub would be full of children and I didn’t inherit a pub just to fill it with children.
So in the end I just increased our prices and now we charge seven pounds a pint.
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Notes:
1. Written on July 15th, 2016
2. In honour of the pub that opened up on the high street a few months earlier
3. It was an extremely little pub
4. And still is