the deals on wheels
Guest beers on trains are one thing, says The Daily Telegraph's pub writer ADAM EDWARDS, but what the networks really need is guest landlords
Last month First Great Western trains agreed to sell Arkell's 3B beer on its intercity trains. The railway company claims the guest beer is a 'new initiative in catering.
As new initiatives go this is, one is tempted to say, pretty small beer. The mainline western trains regularly stocked the Swindon-brewed ale before national franchise companies forced out local food and drink operators in the late 1960s.
But perhaps there is a slim chance that this still-quite-new initiative might inspire something truly revolutionary the buffet-car public house.
The buffet cars of Britain have always been dreadful. In 1868 the author Anthony Trollope described his railway sandwich as 'meagre, poor and spiritless within and Charles Dickens wrote, after travelling on the northern mainline, of being served 'a petrified bun of enormous antiquity. Post-war, British Railways food was famously bad (even if some of it was locally provided) and the British Rail sandwich of the 1970s was so awful it became a national joke.
However, for a brief period at the turn of the 19th-century, there were actually reports of decent grub on trains. Five shillings (£14 in today's money), for example, got you chicken, ham or tongue with bread and cheese and a pint of claret or half-pint of sherry. A pie and a pint of ale or stout were half the price.
It is not so very different from modern pub food. Nowadays the good 21st-century publican is a master of decent, simple sustenance. The best of today's pub grub is as good as any served in history.
Therefore, it seems, the sensible way forward is for individual publicans, rather than anonymous caterers, to run our buffet cars. Refreshment carriages could be re-vamped to look like upmarket, minimalist gastro pubs or rural snug bars, with polished railway knick-knacks substituted for traditional horse brasses.
The victuals, written on a chalkboard, could be left to the imagination of the landlord who, for example, could put on locally-produced cold sausages when the train travels through Cumberland or fresh pasties on the Cornish Flyer. Breweries along particular railway lines might compete for the beer franchise. And the cars could be painted in individual liveries and named say 'the Rolling Stock or 'Diesel & Buffer.
Britain has put up with a century-and-a-half of second-rate food and drink on its rail network. It would be cheering to believe that the 'new initiative Arkells 3B is the pint that smoothes the way to the boozer on bogies.
Crisps are next in line for a ban
I hesitate to mention the subject of bans after the imminent end of smoking in pubs but I fear it can only be time before the potato crisp suffers the same fate as the cigarette.
Gina Gough, 22, was rushed to hospital last month with severe abdominal pains. She had developed gallstones up to one-and-a-half inches in diameter after eating 15 bags of crisps a day for three years. 'I wasn't tempted by any other food, she said. She put on five stones and her personality changed.
This is the spur Health & Safety need to put health warnings on crisp packets. The warnings might be followed by campaigns about the dangers of too much salt, high cholesterol and obesity. This will lead to a law preventing minors from buying bags. Special Crisp Rooms will be set aside in offices for those who like a bag of cheese and onion with their lunchtime sanger.
Finally, eating crisps in pubs, where non-snackers are forced to sit cheek by jowl to Smokey Bacon addicts will be outlawed.
Landlords caught on the hop
Meanwhile hop bines, which have been used to decorate pubs for centuries, have been categorised as a fire hazard by inspectors carrying out firesafety surveys under the new licensing regulations (no, I'm not making this up), and landlords in Kent pubs have been asked to remove the offending garlands.
It is difficult to know whether to laugh at the sheer stupidity of the Kentish authorities or to cry into one's beer no doubt causing a flood hazard and leaving fellow drinkers open to the dangers of passive sobbing.
Colouring our view of the French
I am sad to see sales of Pastis the ubiquitous aniseed-based French tipple plunging. Executives at Pernod Ricard, the company that produces it, believe the slump is due to 'the classic setting of men ordering it in rounds.
In an attempt to halt the fall the company has introduced a yellow-tinted curved bottle to feminise the brand.
Pernod's geometric plastic yellow ashtrays and angular glass water bottles (and the boules players who drank its product) are an integral part of the Anglo-Saxon image of France.
Pastis, like garlic, Gauloises and long, zinc bars are what we love about the cheese-eating, surrender monkeys. Adding a girly touch will colour our romance with the cloudy liquor and therefore with France far more than any gastronomic jibe by President Chirac.