Andrew Vine: Let’s raise a glass to some welcome candour

In through the door, and your heart sinks. It’s gloomy, and where the carpet isn’t threadbare, it’s ever so slightly sticky underfoot. The seating needs re-upholstering and there’s a faint whiff in the air of old cooking oil that’s fried one plateful of chips too many.

Never mind, it’s a nice day and there’s a sign for a beer garden. We’ll go out there. Up to the bar, which is even stickier than the carpet, behind which is a bloke in a shirt that was probably clean a couple of days before. He could do with a shave as well. He doesn’t smile, or say hello, he just flicks his head upwards by way of asking what you’d like.

A pint of Old Mottled Walrus, please, and a glass of dry white wine. There isn’t much change out of £10 and the barman doesn’t say either “please” or “thank you”. Ah, well. A quick look at one of the dog-eared menus, with a tomato sauce stain on it. It’s the usual. This with chips. That with chips. Or you can go for chips on their own.

Out to the beer garden, which is something of a euphemism, because it’s an unswept yard full of rickety old wooden furniture weathered to a dull grey colour that hasn’t been cleaned of bird deposits. Nor have any of the overflowing ashtrays been emptied, or glasses and discarded crisp packets cleared away.

We’ll clear a bit of space over there and sit down. Cheers, and a clink of glasses followed by twin grimaces. The beer is cloudy and has a metallic aftertaste. The wine is fit only for cleaning the bird dirt off the table.

Sound familiar? It should. My entirely fictional pub is drawn from life and grim experience, and it’s a long way from the rosy collective image that is part of the national mindset.

That has the pub as a jolly, welcoming, comfortable home-from-home, full of chatting couples and laughing groups of friends, presided over by mine genial host who likes and welcomes his customers, as do the smiling and polite barmen and barmaids pulling pints of beautifully-kept foaming ale or serving platefuls of hearty, home-cooked grub.

Other ideals usually get painted into the picture as well. If the pub is anywhere rural, it will be half-timbered, with exposed beams spanning the low ceilings, have hanging baskets in the summer, a roaring fire in winter, and serve food produced by the local farmers having a pint at the bar, every meal cooked with flair by a chef who takes pride in his work.

If only this were so. Often enough, pubs both urban and rural are scruffy, overpriced clip joints where customers pay through the nose for surly staff, poor drinks, and cook-chill microwaved pap-and-chips of uncertain provenance which any self-respecting dog would turn down.

This is why the latest edition of the Good Pub Guide deserves a cheer for being candid enough to acknowledge that too many pubs offer indifferent food and drink, and as a result it expects up to 4,000 of them to close over the coming year. Odd though it seems for a publication that celebrates pubs, the guide welcomes such closures, and so should the rest of us.

Good riddance to them. Customers vote with their feet, and there’s no earthly reason why they should go and sit somewhere that is less comfortable than their own homes, eat food that is inferior to anything they could cook themselves, and pay eye-watering prices for drinks they could buy in the supermarkets for half the cost, all the while being glowered at by Kylie behind the bar who’s irritated at being interrupted whilst she’s texting.

The silver lining to all those closures is that they will give the many long-established pubs in town and country alike that observe the highest standards in everything they do some much-needed breathing space, as well as clearing the way for what the guide estimates are 1,000 new pubs run by genuinely genial hosts, serving fairly-priced quality drinks and running kitchens that produce meals worth going out to eat, instead of culinary GBH.

More power to old and new alike as they strive for quality, and a renaissance in the pub trade that’s to the benefit of us all.

Our collective ideal of what pubs should be – especially the oft-mythologised “local” – is all bound up with our sense of community and the social back-and-forth that makes it tick. We want them to be jolly and welcoming because they are places where we’d like to take our old friends and make new ones as well.

So if a coalition of newcomers and the good old pubs makes that ideal a reality, I’ll raise a glass to it. And I’ll raise another one if the Ratcatcher and Terrier and its ilk have had their chips.