1989 Read Online Free PDF

the Daily Express drank in The Popinjay, which had virtually been incorporated into an extension to their art deco black glass palace. The Daily Mirror , up Fetter Lane, drank in The White Hart opposite, though no one ever called it anything other than The Stab (short for The Stab in The Back, an enduring testimony to how what was said in the pub could make or break careers). The Daily Mail drank in The Harrow in Whitefriars Street. The Press Association, Britain’s national news agency which shared 85 Fleet Street with Reuters, drank in The Olde Bell, on the street itself. El Vino, the legendary wine bar opposite the law courts, attracted a wider variety of leader writers and columnists, the types who blended more easily with the barristers and solicitors who formed the rest of its clientele, and were happy with its insistence on jacket and tie at all times, though there were already rumblings against its insistence that women were not allowed in unless they wore skirts and even then could not be served at the bar.
    Reuters men – and the increasing band of women – used to working in the background, their names usually removed from copy before a national newspaper printed it, chose a suitably subterranean locale. It was called, at least as far as I knew in the early days ofmy introduction to ‘the Street’, Mrs Moon’s, bizarrely located underneath a branch of Pizza Hut. Older, wiser heads would eventually inform me that its real name was The Falstaff and it had once been a pub on several stories, but for one reason or another – it seemed hard to imagine it had been for lack of custom – the owners had sold off most of it for offices and the fast food franchise. It had no visible signage anywhere and precious little indication of its existence at ground level. Unless you knew it was there you would only have come across it if you were about to go into Pizza Hut and looked left in the doorway to where a staircase led to an underground room with an old paraffin heater on the linoleum floor and a long mahogany bar propped up by hordes of beer-drinking hacks.
    It was called Mrs Moon’s because, quite literally, the landlady’s name was Mrs Moon. She ran the place with her son, Billy Moon, and a rod of iron that frequently extended to throwing out almost anybody who came in shortly after nine p.m. This was not because she favoured early closing but because nine p.m. was throwing-out time across the road at The Cheshire Cheese, a celebrated seventeenth-century pub and famous tourist haunt. Mrs Moon’s was not the sort of place that would have attracted many tourists – even if they had somehow managed to find it – but it did occasionally pull in senior executive types, including those from Reuters, and Mrs Moon wasn’t having them treat her gaffe as second best.
    It was in Mrs Moon’s that George Short taught me one of the lessons that has stayed with me all my life and really ought to be included in school lessons for British kids and all who value what remains of the most traditional British institution: bar space management. This is the technique essential to making sure the maximum number of people desired can take part in the main activity for which a proper English pub is designed. No, not sinking pints, that is merely the lubrication. Banter. Chitchat. Talking to one another, in a group, not merely in a little cluster of introspective twosomes.
    ‘It’s all right when there’s just two or three of you nattering away,’ said George in his broad West Country accent while trying to marshal his gaggle of keen young wannabes up to the bar. ‘Two of you can lean on the bar and the one in between can face either of them, like a triangle. That still holds good when there’s four, just solong as the two at the bar move apart a bit to make room for two folk facing in. But the trouble really comes, when you get five or more. That’s when you need one bloke to take what I call pole position,’ and he turned his