I’ve been having a big sortout following the move, I can’t believe how much crap I’ve been hoarding over the years, most of it’s going in the bin! Amongst a pile of papers I found a couple of gems though, invitations to pub crawls from my first job as an apprentice at a local factory. I can actually remember both nights out, they were nowhere near as big as some later university nights or even quite a few Shanghai nights but they were my first real introduction to big nights out as a young lad.
The invitations were knocked up by the “students”, a group of young non-locals our company had hired as graduates. They’d all been to university in big cities (as big as they can be in the UK) and in some cases travelled to distant lands. As a group they tended to be disliked, everyone assumed that they must be getting paid a lot more than anyone else but as individuals they were great fun and always up for big nights out and general mayhem. What’s more they didn’t even live with their parents, they shared houses with their friends, a concept which seemed bizarre yet amazing to me at the time, i didn’t even know this was possible. As a young lad who’d never been away from home by myself and hadn’t really travelled they were a big influence on me and their crazy university tales were a major influence in me deciding to go to university in Manchester instead of looking for other work when I got made redundant under the last-in first-out rule (like most British factories we were in constant decline and kept shedding staff until it eventually went out of business completely about 10 years ago. It’s a housing estate now)..
Anyway, back to pub crawls, here are the invitations I kept:
It really struck me how times have changed when I found these, this was only 18 years ago yet before anybody really had mobile phones or even email. Organising a night out like this was a logistical nightmare, invitations were knocked up and pubs/times were discussed in detail way in advance. Everybody invited received a photocopy of the itinerary and could meet up with the rest of the group whenever they wanted through the night.
Of course this meant that on the night out we had to keep a close eye on the clock and make sure we finished up and headed to the next place in time to meet up with others who hadn’t made it out earlier. Every now and then the phone would ring in one of the pubs and the landlord would call out “Is there a Mr Smith here” and our ringleader would head over to the bar to tell a latecomer if we were staying at the current place a while or about to move on. Also, I remember flicking through the yellow pages next to the payphone in the pub and calling the next pub to tell people we were going to be late and consider heading back to the pub we were in or, if nobody had change, dashing off to other pubs to relay updates first hand and pick up confused stragglers. Getting separated from the group or losing the itinerary typically meant the end of the night, this always happened of course, the group got fragmented throughout the night as people decided to stop for an extra beer in a particular pub or pop somewhere else to meet other friends for a quick beer, we’d never end up finding each other again. Monday mornings back in the office we would all huddle together to discuss what trouble our separate groups had managed to get ourselves into on the night, there was always at least one tale of major carnage, trips to the emergency room, taken home in a police car etc etc..
I guess we take it for granted how easy things are now that we all have mobile phones and what a massive impact they’ve had on our lives, we don’t need to plan in advance like this any more, just do everything on the fly, there’s no risk of losing anybody when we’ve all got mobile phones. I can barely remember what it was like before them (or the internet for that matter) yet I managed to make it pretty much all the way through uni without one and still managed to get wrecked pretty much every night.
The other major change since then of course is that most of those pubs have gone. This seems to be a major change of culture in the UK, most of the pubs I remember as a youth are now indian/chinese restaurants and replaced by town-centre bars. From the list of pubs from the itineraries above only two still exist (as far as I can tell), and one of them (The Sun) seems to be more of a restaurant these days.
What on earth is happening in the UK? A lot of these pubs must have been there for the best part of a century and they’ve all disappeared in the last 20 years, it’s a damn shame..
Hmm, I think I can find space to save these invitations..
