Deliverance

The other night, through circumstances beyond my control, a friend and I walked into a pub. Over the years this has become a fairly normal action for me to preform but rarely this turns into a somewhat surreal experience.

A few years ago another friend and I walk into a pub in New Cross, the pub becomes completely silent as we notice that it's mail clientèle are skinheads. We go to the bar and order a couple of pints (yes, I know the correct thing to do in that case was to leave and find another pub). As we stand by the bar chatting, drinking and trying ever so hard to ignore the dozens of piercing looking being burned into our backs. Finally, a half a pint into our drinks, one of the regulars finds the courage to come up to us and says “I know you're new here so I'll forgive you but you're going to finish your drinks than you'll get the fuck outta here”. Suffice to say we took his advice.

Going back to the other night, I'll admit the pub we went to wasn't as bad and was probably a bit more welcoming but it was just as surreal. Walking in, we were presented with a large group of people, non of which would have looked out of place on the set of Deliverance. We weren't out in a small Cornish village (sorry to all the Cornish people but this is the first place that springs to mind) or anywhere where 'inbreeding' is the done thing but looking around this pub, I could almost guarantee that most of them would have been related to a lot of the others in more ways than one.

An utterly surreal experience, as the evening wore on and the small talk got smaller and smaller, we both walked out wondering “what th hell happened back there?” but all was not lost as just up the road, I discovered a place that does great pancakes stuffed with chocolate chip ice cream....