In a Pub News

January. It’s a horrible month, isn’t it? Everybody’s on a bit of a downer, post-Christmas detoxing, cold and damp weather and, for me, a mouthful of pain.
I’ve been struggling with toothache, earache and sinus pain since Christmas Eve and it just won’t blooming well go away, which has all made for a pretty miserable start to the year. (Although, admittedly, it didn’t stop me popping off to Alexandra Palace on Monday and Tuesday to take in a couple of the opening round games for the Snooker Masters…)
To make matters worse, the doctor is blaming the dentist, and the dentist is blaming the doctor. Between them, they can’t decide whether I am suffering from a case of neuralgia, or whether I need to have my wisdom teeth forcibly removed.
All-in-all, then, I’ve pretty much been hiding for the past couple of weeks and hoping that the pain goes away soon. I don’t like dentists at the best of times, but what I have been doing is using this quiet time to get some much-needed work done around the pub.
Our partners Greene King have been making repairs to certain outbuildings, and down in the cellar we’ve had a partition wall installed to halve the size of the room. There was so much space down there and in the summer we spend vast amounts of energy cooling a whole section of the room that just doesn’t need to be cooled. The partition wall reduces the size of the area that the air conditioning has got to work in, hopefully making it much more cost effective.
Naturally, with all that work going on it forced me and the wife to remove all the tat that has gradually been gathering in untouched corners, bin stuff that’s not been needed and revive other things we haven’t looked at for a while or had forgotten about.
Like pump clips.
Abandoned in a selection of boxes, we discovered clips from guest ales that over the years we’ve had in the pub and so we wondered if we could make a display of them. Usually, you’ll find a good ale pub has the walls above and around the bar area adorned with their previous guests, but I wanted to do something different so I turned to an idea I wrote about in my first Saw It Liked It Nicked It feature for the Inapub magazine.
The Thatchers Arms uses beer bottles to display pump clips of ales they have on sale, and we’ve adopted this in The Tharp Arms too to help show off the ales we have on sale in the bar that doesn’t have hand pumps.
But now we are attaching the old pump clips to bottles and then standing them around the bar window areas to create a nice, and effective, display of guest ales from the past. I’m not sure Barmaid Amy was that pleased when I asked her to start peeling labels from so many bottles, but the end result looks stunning and has already grown to include so many more clips from the few you see in the picture (click on the images on the right).
The task has been keeping me busy and my mind off my aches and pains. All I’ve got to do now is hope some light-fingered pump clip collector doesn’t get the wrong idea…

Anthony Worral Thompson
I read recently that AWT’s reasoning for his recent misdemeanour is all down to the stress of not having a day off over Christmas. Well, like so many of us in the pub trade, I didn’t get a day off over Christmas and New Year either, but I’ve never felt the urge to nip down to Tesco and pinch some cheese…

Mark Daniels is the licensee of The Tharp Arms in Chippenham, Cambs. Follow him on Twitter @marktharparms