General

I’ve never felt any compulsion to collect them. In fact, in the past I’ve been more inclined to tear them apart as a way to do something with my hands while my mates took the more dangerous option of smoking. But all the while I have taken note of the designs on them and admired…

Bohem Brewery was delighted to receive the Mayor of Haringey Cllr Adam Jogee, along with a deputation from Haringey Council, in the tap room in Myddleton Road on Friday. The Mayor asked to visit the taproom after Bohem Brewery donated four bar tabs worth £50 each a prizes for Haringey Council’s new Treasure Trail scheme…

While the media zealously focused its attention on various nightclubs opening on the stroke of midnight for the ridiculously named “Freedom Day” as they satisfied lengthy queues of youngsters, the reality on the ground on 19 July was more subdued and felt rather like the previous Monday in the pubs I visited. Any enthusiasm people…

The Lamb on Holloway Road in north London is, outwardly, no different to many of the other 45,000 pubs up and down the country that welcomed customers into their premises for the first time in many months on 17 May. But it doesn’t take too much scratching below the surface to find that just like…

And so once more we wend our weary way to the pub. Dates for the diary were April 12 and, by the time this is published, May 17 will have come and gone and we might start to forget those pub-less months between the end of the old year and the start of the spring.…

Cowering under a slightly-too-small umbrella to protect myself from a blackened sky that was gushing out a torrent of rain, while receiving no benefit whatsoever from an outdoor heater that was bereft of gas, was not my idea of how to conduct a business meeting. When you add in the choice of only two bog-standard…

Walking down my local high street mid-morning on Monday 12 April for the momentous day when outdoor drinking at pubs and visiting non-essential shops became possible again, it was noticeable the barbers shop had no queue outside whereas the JD Wetherspoon was a hive of activity on its modest concrete front garden. For these drinkers,…

As the sun blazed down outside the Café Hegeraad in the Jordaan district of Amsterdam, my wife led me straight past the crowds drinking on the market square and around a spare pair of seats to instead sit at a rickety table in the completely empty dark-wood interior of the compact front bar. Although the…