Celebrate the festive season with good food and drink, says Adam Edwards - and let's ban the singing reindeers from our pubs
For 11 months of the year the English pub is a safe haven into which one can escape from the vagaries of modern life. It is a faithful friend, as loyal, familiar and unassuming as a black Labrador. But in December it becomes a stranger: drawn to tinsel like a tart to neon it transmogrifies into a festive nightmare.
Quite why sensible publicans should lose all reason for four weeks in mid-winter and garland their establishments with cheap tat and mere- tricious alloy is something of a mystery.
For a start the modern commercial Christmas is a foreign invention. The Christmas tree was brought over by the German Georgian kings; the Christmas crib was a Dutch idea; American Thomas Edison invented the fairy lights; Coca-Cola dressed Father Christmas in red, and the US Addis Brush Company created the first artificial Christmas tree by using machinery designed to make toilet brushes.
England, on the other hand, traditionally celebrated the pagan festival of Yule. It was held during the winter solstice to ward off evil spirits. Our ancient customs include putting a Yule log on the fire and keeping it alight until Twelfth Night, feeding hens with poppy-seed on 24 December to improve laying, giving the walnut tree a seasonal beating and dressing Father Christmas in green as a sign of the returning spring.
Yet the English pub, which emerged in the Middle Ages, when peasants were bent double under Yule logs, prefers to take its lead from the modern American shopping malls of middle England. Twinkling lights, reindeers that sing, dreadful festive paper napkins and turkey dinners are obligatory in the licensed trade, the whole personified by the piped muzak of Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody.
The pub should eschew such trimmings. Publicans should leave their pub interiors untouched by the birth of Christ. Instead they should spend time and effort producing great beers, wonderful mulled wines, seasonal Stiltons and other celebratory victuals. That, after all, is the cheer we drinkers need to escape the vulgar festive sort.
JDW delivers your morning pint
The pub chain JD Wetherspoon is planning to serve alcohol from 9am: 'If they want a pint we will give them a pint,' says company spokesman Eddie Gershon. He added that it was not for Wetherspoon's 'to make this a moral issue'.
That, as we all know, has been the business of the puritanical Daily Mail, which is likely to have a post 24-hour legislation apoplectic fit of fury at the news.
And yet Wetherspoon's is only doing what has been common practice on the Continent for as long as foreigners have gesticulated. When I lived in Paris in the early 1980s breakfast in the local cafe consisted of a hard-boiled egg, a game of pinball and a very large Cognac. I have yet to find a better way to start the working day.
Cancer scare ignores the facts
And while I am on the subject of 24-hour drinking the last medical scare before the bill was enacted was the daffiest - that the new legislation will give you mouth cancer.
According to Professor Alex Markham the chief executive of Cancer Research UK who disapproves of the law: 'The recent rise in mouth cancer appears to be one of the unfortunate outcomes of excessive drinking in this country.' He is against the new legislation because he thinks it will produce an increase in drinking and therefore an increase in mouth cancer.
I note that Cancer Research UK did not issue the same scare story when figures were published that show, as they have done for the last quarter of a century, the dramatic increase in the level of drinking at home.
The new figures are as meaningless as are the ludicrous statistics for passive smoking that among other things always fail to take into account open fires, barbecues, griddles, fondue nights, pub quiz hot air and global warning.
I don't know why Cancer Research UK doesn't just come out with the bald statement 'Licensed premises give you cancer' and be done with it.
Bar advice for Corrie star
Actress Bev Callard, who plays Coronation Street barmaid Liz McDonald, has taken on a real-life pub, the White Horse in Eccles, Greater Manchester. However, before she rushes into the business she should know that the Rover's Return is different from other pubs. Here are some top tips she might find useful.
l Not every man automatically orders a pint of Newton & Ridley bitter
l Most women don't drink pints
l Not all customers have the exact money - and most expect change
l Many customers smoke
l Others swear
l Some order crisps and peanuts
l And most customers order dishes other than Betty's Hotpot, which will, I promise, need a kitchen or microwave to cook them.