Just grin and bear it

As St Valentine's Day candlelight flickers through the February gloom, Adam Edwards suggests

a glimmer of hope for winter trade

Early February is the licensees' darkest hour. As Lent beckons, pubs echo eerily and tills are silent. The jolly Christmas drinkers have long since vanished, repenting their boozy ways as they gloomily contemplate inflexible credit card bills and fatty livers.

And yet there is a flickering glimmer of light beyond the empty bar for pubs and their customers - St Valentine's Day.

Since pubs started serving food, February 14 has become an early-season money-spinner. The romantic "dinner-for-two" is mine host's first chance of the new year to charge like a wounded bull. His pasta and cheap sparkling wine menu is a steal. A stale bread roll metamorphoses into a £1.50 cover charge, while a red paper napkin adds 10% to the bill.

This is the night when customers are shoe-horned into the table beside the kitchen doors, the barmaid forgets an order, the kitchen gets everything wrong and the bill isn't checked. And still the customer is satisfied.

The reason for this bizarre state of affairs is that every WAG (wife and girlfriend) feels it is her inalienable right to be taken out to the pub on Valentine's Night for a drink and something to eat. She does not want to be taken out the night before or the night after, when every pub would welcome her and treat her with distinction, but only on the dreaded evening itself. She claims it's "more romantic". And every male must be prepared to meet this traditional request.

So with the addition of a smile and a supermarket red rose, every sensible publican can count the twenty-pound notes, or "February blues" as my local landlord calls them.

At first, this might seem hard on customers. After all, instead of retiring to his favourite pub to escape from the missus, the put-upon male must take her with him for a night of feigned romance. Meanwhile, his partner must suffer the indignity of a grumpy companion and grim meal.

And yet I believe that with a bit of positive thinking, the evening can be deemed a success by all. The publican makes out like a bandit, while his customers could try thinking of the night in the same way as my friend Julian regards Christmas. Julian never fails to attend a famously dreadful party held on the last weekend in November.

"I always insist on going," he says. "Nothing on earth could be worse than that party, so every night afterwards feels just like Christmas by comparison."

Darts degree

I am grateful for the latest edition of the excellent Pub History Society Newsletter for informing me that one of its members had achieved a PhD in darts.

After ten years of self-funded postgraduate research, Patrick Chaplin of Maldon, Essex, has been awarded a degree by

Anglia Ruskin University for his dissertation "Darts in England 1900 - 1939: A Social History".

Patrick, nicknamed "Doctor Darts" by Darts World Magazine and "an arrers nut" by The Sun, claims that darts has an ancestry reaching back millions of years, "back to the time when the earliest humans lived on the African savannah and hunted by throwing rocks at antelopes, pigs and gazelles". Unfortunately, that seems to be the sum of Prof Chaplin's pre-20th century darts knowledge. A "darts Dark Ages" appears to have existed between prehistoric times and the early 20th century, when the first brewery leagues began to appear and the News of the World established a national competition.

Evidence that the Prof did manage to unearth during his lengthy studies includes the fact that the Beatles used to give away Apple Corp dartboards with the Apple logo centred on the bull's eye, that the Republic of Yemen features darts on its stamps and that the technical name for darts flight collectors is belopterophilists.

Chaplin's studies have led him to set up a website (www.patrickchaplin.com) and consider publishing the first full history of the sport, called The People's History of Darts, a volume that I imagine to be as slim as The Book of Great Medieval Darts Heroes and The Arrows Diet.

Stamping out prejudice

A blue plaque has been unveiled at the former Bull and George Inn in Dartford, Kent, recognising achievements of the novelist Jane Austen. The Pride and Prejudice author is reputed to have stayed there occasionally.

However, when the mayor of Dartford, Councillor Dave Hammond, unveiled the plaque on the wall of the old inn - now a branch of Boots the Chemist - he failed to mention that this was the same Jane Austen who complained about the pub's "bad butter", its lack of oyster sauce and the fact that her luggage was put on the wrong carriage and driven off towards Gravesend.

Mind you, the fact that she agreed to stay in Dartford at all must be worth commending.

Bacchanalian delights

In these depressing days when smoking is already banned in some pubs and the authorities are beginning to target alcohol, an ageing licensing lawyer recently repeated to me an Old Testament quotation he used to convince magistrates of the merits of granting a licence to sell liquor. It's worth reprinting here:

"Wine is as good as life to a man if it be drunk moderately. What is life then to man that is without wine? For it was made to make man glad. Wine, measurably drunk and in season, bringeth gladness of the heart and cheerfulness of the mind." - Ecclesiasticus, chapter 31, verse 27.