GUY HENDERSON

IDID my bit the other evening to hasten the death of my local pub. I bought four pints of fizzy beer in the supermarket for less than one pint would have cost me over the bar.

Three of them are still in the fridge but I drank one while watching the cycling on TV, and then thought how much better it would have tasted if I had been drinking it in the pub.

The pub trade has been warning for years about what will happen if we continue to buy our beer in the supermarket and drink it at home. It will dwindle and die, and we have already seen so many of our favourite pubs go to the wall in recent years.

I was chatting to local historian Kevin Dixon the other evening, and he said he had compiled a list of more than 100 pubs in Torquay alone which have either changed their identity or closed completely in his lifetime.

The list in Paignton is shorter, but some of the names will evoke happy memories. Among those to have vanished are the Tom Cobley, the Grange, the Globe, the Gerston and the Casino, where the irreplaceable Curly Fields used to hold court. The Brass Monkey has gone, and so has the Half Moon, and so has the old Victoria in Church Street.

All of these pubs were busy every night at one time, each with its own band of loyal regulars.

Some of our pubs have been re-purposed into grills and steak houses, and three cheers for that. They’re still open.

Once they have gone, they have gone for ever.

At my local, which to my shame I have hardly visited in years, I used to be a regular in the football team and the quiz team. I played pool for the pub once in a while and darts just once, when they were so shorthanded that I came up in the conversation about how they were going to fill the team sheet.

I was beaten without troubling the scorers and was never considered for inclusion again.

I never mastered the arcane business of euchre.

The Torbay Quiz league took us on a winter-long tour of South Devon’s pubs, playing away matches in exotic far-away places like St Marychurch and Brixham.

Our pub – the Devonport Arms in the heart of its community in St Michael’s Road – had a half-decent quiz team. We were averagely good at general knowledge but very good at sport, thanks to a couple of our players who were walking encyclopedias of sporting statistics.

Every Wednesday night we would sit opposite opponents from far and wide. There would be furrowed brows and yelps of frustration at the answer that just would not come. The worst thing of all was the smug hand placed on the table by someone sitting opposite you, indicating that they knew the answer that was eluding you for the statutory 10 seconds and were poised to snap up the bonus point when the time elapsed.

Actually, the worst thing of all was the smoke. I was a perpetrator at the time, but imagine now two rows of people sitting a table’s width apart, most of them busy smoking and exhaling straight at one another throughout a long evening of quizzing.

By the end, your clothes would have absorbed great clouds of the stuff and everything you wore would have to go straight in the wash.

Imagine the damage we did to each other’s lungs. Today’s pubs are cleaner than that. If you want to smoke, you go outside to do it.

We use them or we lose them. It’s as simple as that. I’ll think about that before I buy supermarket beer again.

» Guy Henderson is a

Local Democracy Reporter for Radio Exe