A Life in Pubs 5) Bar Said

This is another one I've no pictures of, and it's not like a google will help. Way back in 2006 I did a short spell of voluntary work in Tanzania. Staying on the edge of a village in Tendaguru, in the Arusha district of northern Tanzania, this was what people think of when they say "deepest Africa."

If you travel to one of these places on one of these programmes, you stay in a big complex with all the other volunteers and some staff who're generally from the local community. It brings a lot of money into the local economy, and one thing you'll always find is a bar, set up just outside the complex. There was one outside the place I stayed in Thailand when I volunteered there, and that was great fun, but Said's is the one I remember best.

Nothing but a shack with a one-man bar and some fridges run on a portable generator, some benches, chairs and tables, and a couple of holes in the ground behind some walls to act as toilets. It was the barest possible thing that could be called a pub, but it was a joy, and that was down to the people. Not just the other volunteers, mostly from the States but also from the UK, NZ and Australia, some of whom I'm lucky enough to still count as friends. But also the locals who'd drink there, some of them trying to sell us stuff but also happy to sit down and share a drink and a chat about life out there. And Said himself, a huge bloke with a great sense of humour who used to tell us a different story about his background every time we asked.

But no pictures from dark nights sat at those wobbly tables. So I'll have to represent Bar Said with a bottle of Tusker, our favourite African beer. Bia yangu, Nchi yangu!

A Life in Pubs 4) The Marlborough Head

The problem with these pub experiences is that they all happened so long ago that the pubs are either gone, or they've changed so much there are no pictures of them online as they were. Somewhere I might still have some photos of nights at the Marlborough Head, but if so they're buried away somewhere.

The Marlborough Head is an old pub on the corner of North Row and North Audley Street, just off Oxford Street in central London. It was perfectly placed, almost opposite my halls of residence during my brief time at university. The pub and my home formed a handy triangle with a cashpoint and there was rarely any need to go further on a night out, unless there was an event on or we really fancied a kebab.

Apart from the perfect location, the great thing about the Marlborough was that it was part of the Eerie Pub Co, a ridiculous chain of gothic horror theme pubs. (There was another one in Nottingham called The Pit and the Pendulum, but it wasn't as good.) They might have picked the Marlborough since it was supposedly haunted by the ghosts of executed criminals, but any spirits there doubtless moved on out of embarrassment. It was filled with silly old tat like rows of test tubes filled with food colouring, fake skulls covered in fake cobwebs and that sort of nonsense. The best bit was the toilets, which were hidden behind a false bookcase with only a sign on the floor to give them away. Watching drunk people trying to find them was hilarious.

The chain did a range of cocktails called the Seven Deadly Sins, and if you drank all seven you got to pick either a free pitcher of one of them or a T-shirt. You were supposed to do them all in one night, of course, but the bar staff didn't really care, so what you had was essentially a Nero's stamp card for booze. Given that we went there almost every night, most Saturdays we could pick the last one and then get our favourite as a pitcher. Each. Plus maybe another one to kick off the collection again. If you did go for them all in one night, it was important to take the heavily cream-based Gluttony first, because drinking it on top of the others tended to result in sudden regurgitation.

I spent a lot of time in this pub with my first proper girlfriend, Amy, and often hooligans from back home. Having a pub that close to home was not conducive to studies, though.

According to the interwebs the chain went under some time ago, and the Marlborough was refurbished in 2008, so no more Deadly Sins or trick lavatories. 

A Life in Pubs 3) The Scaynes Hill Social Club

My old home town is not a large place. Anyone who's not from round these 'ere parts, Scaynes Hill is a bit of housing, some fields and some woods that exists as a growth on Haywards Heath. Isolated fancy houses with their own grounds that are too posh to exist in an actual town exist all around it and are sort of lumped in there with the village. It's right on the edge of West Sussex, and you're pretty much out of it once you cross the border into East Sussex.

I did a lot of growing up in Scaynes Hill. we moved there when I was twelve, I think, and I was still there well into my twenties. There is not a lot to do in the village and I mostly went out in the nearby towns, but I still spent plenty of time in the village pubs. There are only two pubs in Scaynes Hill, three if you count the Snowdrop which is really beyond the village. Otherwise it's the Farmers (which was pretty nice) and the Sloop (which was very nice but a bit of a walk).

But the main place we'd go for a drink in the village was the Social Club, which was about a hundred yards away from our house across a field, although annoyingly, the farmer who owned it wouldn't lay a nice path down and knock down his fences, so we had to go all the way round, adding a good five minutes onto our walk. Probably ten minutes on the way back.

The Social Club was basically just a big shed, with a bar, a pool room, and a bit of decking. It was, however, cosy, welcoming, and above all, cheap. Every Saturday there was a quiz, which was almost always hosted by my dad, and twice by me. There was some absolutely terrible karaoke, some beery barbecues, and a lot of very nice beer. Every Christmas day there'd be a traditional walk over to the Club for a festive pint. Half the clientele were old-fashioned, country types, with the proper Sussex accent that is now almost extinct; the other half were footballers. Occasionally there'd be a band on, usually Slow Down Mavis (which I was not part of but did name).

The Social Club was quiet, dull and a safe space to learn how to drink more pints of beer than is strictly necessary.

A Life in Pubs 2) Chaplin's

I sadly can't find a decent picture of this place, since even the pub that replaced it closed years ago. Chaplin's was a Hollywood comedy theme pub in Burgess Hill, and that's not something most towns can boast. I do not not how a Hollywood comedy theme pub came to be, I do not know why, I just know that for one reason or another it became our regular haunt back in the early years of the century. Actually, it was probably because they never ID'd us and we started going there when we were seventeen.

When you walked into Chaplin's, you were greeted by a battered mannequin of Charlie Chaplin himself, although more than one person was convinced it was meant to be Hitler. There were pictures of classic Hollywood stars on the walls, including a huge picture of Laurel and Hardy, who looked more and more like my good friends Paul and Andy every time we went there.

The beers weren't great, the wines weren't either, but we were kids and it wasn't expensive, so we didn't care. We continued drinking there for years. There was karaoke on Thursdays, where we originated the classic cockney'd up version of Avril Lavigne's "Complicated," and sang some particularly boisterous renditions of "Build Me Up Buttercup." There was a quiz once a week, which was repeated up the road at the Railway Tavern on the weekends, allowing the attentive quizzer an excellent opportunity for cheating.

Chaplin's was crap, but it was the pleasant sort of crap that leads to fond memories. Above Chaplin's was Checkers, an absolutely terrible nightclub by all accounts that I succesfully managed to avoid visiting until it shut down. The whole lot was bought up and got a makeover. Chaplin's became Pulse, which was equally naff but not in the same way. Checkers was replaced by a strip club, leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the sheltered populace of Burgess Hill. Then this mysteriously burnt down, taking Pulse with it. 

A Life in Pubs 1) The Caroline of Brunswick

Part one of "Pubs that have had a measurable impact on my life," with thanks to Nick Kent who started this on the Facebook. Ten pubs that have actually, in some way, changed my life, or at the very least, ones I've spent enough time in or enjoyed enough to be worth mentioning.

The first such pub has to be the Caroline of Brunswick in Brighton, a pub which has genuinely changed my life.

The Caroline, named for the wife of King George IV, who had a rather ostentatious holiday home built just down the road, is pretty bloody unique. It's a rock pub that with some cool/explicit/deeply strange artwork all over the walls, known for its colourful clientele, loud music and a great upstairs venue that always has some excellent comedy performers. The Caroline was the venue for the long-running sci-fi and nerdage quiz The Geekest Link, where I was part of winning teams many times, including the Star Trek special where we achieved the only full marks in the quiz's history.

More importantly, though, the Caroline is where I met my love Suzanne, both times we met for the first time.

The first first time was at the quiz, when we ended up on a team together due to insufficient tables. We kind of forgot about this though until we both twigged some years later.

The second first time we met, and the important one, was upstairs at the Funmy Comedy Shoe. I went along with a friend who was, at the time, seeing Mr Simon Plotkin, the legendary host of the Shoe, and also in an improv troupe with Suz. We shared a table, talked about Red Dwarf, and that was that.

Well, actually, it was ages before we got together, but that was my fault. I'm slow on the uptake. But I am very good at Star Trek trivia, and I did win the shoe-off that night.