Creative Writing Course - 3rd week's homework.

Last week Doug, our tutor, asked us to write a monologue for our homework.  I was a bit worried about this because I thought it would be difficult.  I put it off all week until I had only one day left, and that sort of pressure can induce manic depression in a procrastinator like me.


Some twenty-odd years ago, I was a driving instructor.  I happen, also, to be teaching my wife to drive at the moment so I did toy with the idea of writing a personal perspective of what it is like to sit next to a learner driver without the benefit of dual controls.  However, my wife reads my blog and I knew I’d be unable to disguise my sarcasm.  For instance, this week, having almost stalled the car by arriving at a roundabout at 5mph, in fourth, she asked me a question she has asked many times before. ‘When should I put the clutch down if I’m stopping?’  I replied, whilst checking I still had all my fillings, ‘before the car shakes so violently you need a dustpan and brush to park it!’  Fortunately, we had started moving again and she was too busy worrying about getting round the roundabout to give me the slap she undoubtedly thought I deserved at the time.  I would be much more vulnerable if she were reading about her driving exploits next to me in bed with her manicure kit in close proximity, so I ruled out the subject, for health and safety reasons.


For the past twenty years, I have managed and owned various pubs.  There had to be loads of material lurking in those memories, but I couldn’t seem to think of anything to get me started.  Then I remembered a piece of writing I had done ten years earlier when on a solo trip to The Maldives.  I had booked the last minute bargain holiday to prepare me for the onslaught of Christmas at the busy pub I was running in Nottingham.  I spent an idyllic week in a tropical paradise, swimming on the most amazing reefs and sunbathing on hot, white beaches whilst scarcely avoiding skin cancer.  I read the only book I had taken on the first day, and the selection of literature on the tiny island was limited.  I also had an overwhelming desire to be creative, and so I began writing.  Nothing that I ever thought I would use, just a few cathartic paragraphs to complement the therapeutic benefits of being in another world.  That rambling monologue had survived on an old laptop and I have dusted it off for this week’s offering.

It is often said, usually by people who believe that getting regularly pissed makes them an expert, that being a publican is a way of life.  Running a pub, I know this is true, in its literal sense.  Whereas the average drunk who makes the statement, believes it to be a way of life to be much envied.  A vocation that brings such bountiful rewards and perks, as staying in bed until just before opening at 11am. Or getting to drink whatever and whenever one pleases - free of course, because all breweries are altruistic organisations who, in an attempt to encourage licensees to be sociable, give them a generous hospitality budget to give free drinks to any tosser who dumps himself at their bar.  The fact that they never witness me complying with my company's Policy of Philanthropy by giving away beer, does not discourage their assumption.  On the contrary, they see this as evidence that I must singlehandedly drink my hospitality budget, at the expense of their personal benefit, and this reinforces their view that my way of life is akin to what they hope God has in store for them when they fall off their bar stool for the very last time.  If I were not an atheist, I would hope that Beelzebub, (to whom God must surely devolve all responsibility for their eternal welfare) will fill their days with a well balanced timetable of cleaning shitty toilet bowls and vomit-filled urinals, whilst trying to do the job of at least two students, who took on bar work to avoid a student loan less than John Prescott's lard budget, but who subsequently forgot that a mutual part  of the deal was a requirement for them to drag their arses out of bed.  If the Lord of Darkness could also give them a generous hospitality budget to ensure they suffer in perpetuity the sort of hangover it is only possible to achieve from a three-day binge with Oliver Reed, then divine justice would have been done.

It's not that I'm unhappy with my lot you understand.  I've been running pubs for almost ten years, though mainly out of financial necessity for the last five.   Yet I do often catch myself wondering if I was ever cut out to run a pub at all.  I certainly wouldn't describe myself as an overly gregarious person.  I like people, and can converse reasonably competently on many social levels, but I prefer to be selective.  I do not enjoy being forced to feign interest in whatever drivel happens to be spewing forth from the Stella Artwatted manic depressive who feels compelled to keep me company during the full two hours of the 3 till 5pm graveyard shift, when I have much more satisfying things to do, like sanitising the ice machine or changing urinal blocks.

I got involved in the licensed trade, as I said, about ten years ago.  I was previously a driving instructor.  My business partner at the time had started dating his local pub landlady at a time when Margaret Thatcher, contrary to her pledge of "home ownership for the masses", had allowed interest rates to hit the bankrupting levels of over 15%.  I was one of those who bought into negative equity.  The business struggled, the car spluttered to the end of its career and my then-girlfriend left me with a mortgage that might as well have been a Third World debt.  I was desperate and in danger of losing everything I’d worked for.  My previous thirty years on planet earth was about to be deleted from some cosmic register if I didn’t act.  My ex-business partner and his now-wife were running a charming riverside pub in a country village where I would occasionally help out and even look after the place when they went on holiday.  I was beginning to think I might be reasonably good at the job when an advertisement in a newspaper proclaimed that an up-and-coming Freehouse Company was desperately seeking Trainee Pub Managers without encumbrances.  I was so unencumbered I was in danger of becoming clinically depressed at the thought and so I applied.  The rest, as they say, is history.