Day 110: I Go To The Pub

Here is a photograph of the interior of my local where, on Friday night, I was sipping gently from a glass of sweet white wine and eating peanuts whilst lying on a stained dark green velvet sofa, watching a fupbal match and trying to understand computers.

From the outside it looks like it has been Done Over with a blowtorch and a packet of chalk. It looks dangerous. Until about five years ago, there wasn't much point going in it because the only things you could sit on were sofas taken off a tip, cut in half with a chainsaw and propped up on bricks. Anyway, they had a Makeover a while back and now it's got chairs in it and everything.

It struck me on Friday night that it looks like what people from Foreign Lands think British pubs look like. Except none of them do, apart from my local. The same people are there every time I go, but I have never seen them on the street, even though I've lived here for eight years. Everyone smokes Lambert & Butler and ignores when you come in. It has an excellent and strange jukebox that I do not use and is the last remaining outlet of Scampi Fries in the Southern Hemisphere. The barlady remembers your round, and there is an old bloke in the corner who winks and drinks Advocaat. It is Devoid of Media Twats, unlike every other pub in Brixton. (TwatBoy tried going but I think has now stopped; he went a lot, then went with his silly City friends and had a bit of a fright one night, but he still hasn't told me what happened.)

On Thursday there is Quiz Night, at which you can win beer cash. This is not money with which you could buy beer if you chose, but free beer to the value of - I think - £20. Except I have never won the pub quiz, because it is too hard.

(No doubt TwatBoy would go with his City friends and guffaw, and say "Oh, but we've all got degrees, so we're bound to win", and then someone would hear him, and they would call him a twat if they could be arsed.)

There is a pub called The Trinity Arms in Brixton which is a nice pub. It is often described as "a real pub", but the problem with The Trinity Arms is that it is full of people looking for "a real pub"; people who go to Borough Market to buy bread for £5 a loaf, belong to CAMRA and waste their lives in pursuit of authenticity. It has strangely glossy people working behind the bar; they sell white Rioja and people use BlackBerries openly and without shame in the beer garden.

My local hasn't got a beer garden. It is full of people I don't know. It is like something out of 1957. They sell terrible booze, and you can't breathe for the fag smoke. It is probably funded by the IRA. I don't even love it, or feel possessive about it. It's just there, being a pub, smelling of Lambert & Butler and stale Carling, down the road a bit and round the corner.