[email protected] wrote: > 2009/2/19 Adrian Stott <[email protected]> > > Surely the problem can't be that boaters don't drink enough these > > days? > > > I think in some respects it's true. In the past on the cut, if you drunk at > all, you drunk at pubs. You might, God forbid, have a Watneys Party Seven on > board;
Steve's mention of Watneys canned beer leads me to wonder if that's a clue to a couple of things that have changed: If I remember rightly, 30ish years ago most beer available from most off licences was rather undistinguished national brands (such as Long Life, Worthington E etc), and mostly sold at not that much less than draught beer in pubs. Once I'd been drinking long enough to tell the difference, and once the decline in pubs selling real ale had gone into reverse, it was often a choice between a decent pint in nice convivial surroundings in a canalside pub or a tin of very mediocre pale ale on the boat - for not far short of the same price. Now, the choice is between the same decent pint of ale in a canalside pub or paying half as much for an almost-as-good 500ml bottle of decent (if not technically 'real') ale. Or paying a quarter as much for the cheap stuff. and occasionally you might take a jug along for carry out. But beer > was the drink. Now, of course, we all drink wine. And gin and whiskey and I > don't know what else too. Part of it the fact we can afford it; part of it's > the social revolution in the country and the canals the last 25 years. Part > of it is just boaters being tight the way we always have been. For a couple > of pints in a pub you can get a half decent bottle of wine. And that's another thing that's changed. Thirty years ago I don't think you'd have got *any* bottle of wine for less than the price of about 4 pints of beer. Martin L (trying desperately to avoid straying into (a) rose-tinted spectacle mode (b) the dreaded north-south divide (c) the well-known Python sketch)
