The Pub Travels Through Time, but Regresses

My former favourite pub is a time machine...

I swear to god it is something to do with the cellar. I caught a glimpse down there once, I didn't see any barrels of beer or spare bottles of spirits or crates of over priced coke bottles the size of thimbles.

Instead I saw a blue glow like Cerenkow rediation, and the sound of some massive demonic device that seemed to be sucking all the power out of the pub and setting off fire alarms, and bringing forth smoke.

This device seems to be some kind of time regression device. It's the only thing I can think of it being, For it is caused evolution, of the human race in particular, to run backwards.

Sometimes, I wonder if that also includes myself.

When I first started going, in the dim mists of (pub) time, the pub was a quiet stronghold of the intelligentsia, and dammit we were proud. The only pub open till 2am, it was our own speakeasy. It got more popular. Students were there playing music. There were lock ins for the chosen few, until 830am in one case.

Then the bad people heard about it, and initimidation arrived, along with horribly cheap coke snorted in the medievally unhygienic lavatories. The lock in bar staff left, and bar staff who encouraged the presence of thugs arrived.

The hairlines got lower, the knuckles began to drag. Faces began to bear the mark of inbreeding, rough voices, IQs lower than the pool balls used on the (sign of doom) pool tables. Fruit machines for the hopeless gambler. DNA decaying, you could see strands of it disappearing out the window, synapses dying just by being in there.

Bouncers on the door. Sub humans now present, girls with cottage loaf bun hairstyles, lacquered so they are hard and shiny, like the crappest bargain hunt antiques. Voice boxes have now de-evolved to the point where they can only make harsh, guttural sounds. As for the men...

Ballards Drowned World...people have lost the need for brains, they are operating with their spinal columns alone. Floodwaters rise, the pub is filled with giant ferns for the rabble to fight in. They spend so much time punching on the floor, the local pub-goer now walks on all fours. They copulate in the pub by masturbating onto the floor, the females then rub themselves in it like a lamprey or hag fish. 4 weeks later flat headed children are born, and she is ready for the next litter.

I'm watching all this. Recording it. Scientific observations from my corner. Taking genetic samples from drool and spittle and breeding fluids.

My once favourite pub is now in the Pre-Cambrian.

"The Prestige" and the Cinematic Pub I'd Most Like to Drink In

Whenever I watch "The Prestige", Christopher "Inception" Nolan's superlative and apparently under-rated (not by me) movie about rival magicians in the late 19th century, one of the many thoughts I have rattling around my head is this;

"God I'd so love to drink in that pub! It looks amazing."

David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, and Hugh Jackman as The Great Danton

"The Prestige" features many pubs; stews of East London, champagne dens of the West End, but one reigns supreme in my eyes. It is featured in two scenes where Hugh Jackman's Danton character meets up with his fixer played by Michael Caine, and it beyond irritates me that I can't find any stills featuring it.

A lot of people, I surmise with no actual evidence whatsoever, probably like the idea of drinking in wild, decadent cat house bars, like those ones featured in Westerns, or going further back in history the pig shitted riot of Tortuga's brothel in "Pirates of the Caribbean." But really, would you really want to drink in that place in reality. All the brawling, gunfights when you are trying to read a good book, and lice ridden clientele?

No, you really want to visit a bar like that featured in the two scenes I mentioned, a beautifully elegant establishment with a high glass ceiling  -giving an orangery feel - lots of refreshing plants, and glass racks tended to by smart gentlemen in bowler hats before high quality ale is served forth to richly whiskered patrons. Sadly, it's a set constructed in the entrance atrium of a modern building, I believe, and doesn't exist in reality.

Because I would so want to drink there. It so looks like my kind of pub.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.08.14