Hamish Champ: One of life's 'average' pleasures

We hear a lot about 'averages' these days. Average age of customers in a pub; average customer spend; average pub profitability, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

Every now and again one reads of the average amount of time the average person spends in a pub on a weekly basis.

With this in mind I recall recently reading somewhere that Joe Public visits the pub on average three times a week.

While I applaud this valuable use of time in the pursuit of happiness and that such pleasure is being derived from the watering holes of this great nation, I couldn't help wondering how 'they' - the mysterious amorphous mass of fact-finders who regularly unearth unverifiable facts we all love to quote in polite conversation without quite knowing their veracity - knew this salient fact.

The other thing that bothered me (well, not 'bothered' exactly; more like 'puzzled') was if indeed this assertion proved verifiable where on earth did people find the time to visit the pub so often?

Before I joined the Publican I could go quite literally weeks without seeing the inside of a boozer. This was certainly not because I didn't like pubs. I did. I do. Passionately, as it happens. It's just I never had the bleedin' time.

I would of course while away the hours in a lovely old pub if I could afford the time to. In fact I often think that if I ever won the lottery I would effectively live in a pub.

The idea of day after day sitting in a rural pub, newspapers to hand or a good book and a pint of decent or even indecent cask ale at my elbow with nothing to worry about is as close to bliss as I can imagine getting on a website where some readers may have a sensitive disposition.

I especially love lunchtime drinking more than anything else, as anyone who's shared a few beers with me around noon will tell you.

I have been lucky enough to spend all day in a pub on a few occasions. But like most of life's pleasures it is those same pleasures' rarity value enhances the experience.

And the sad fact is, if I could do it all the time I probably wouldn't enjoy it half as much. As Max Miller might have put it…