Hamish Champ: Pubs? They can make a man of you

I was talking to the father of one of my son's schoolmates last week and in the course of our conversation he asked me what I did for a living.

"I write about the pub trade," I told him. His eyes lit up and he revealed he had been born and had grown up in a pub in Peckham, South London. His mum was a landlady of near-legendary status in her community, the pub she ran being the focal point for the local population and where, to paraphrase the song in the TV programme 'Cheers', everybody knew your name.

He absolutely loved living in that pub, he told me. Growing up there was like being at the centre of an amazing universe, with all aspects of human life on display.

Plus, he said, all his school friends were dead jealous. They assumed being surrounded by boxes containing packets of cheese and onion crisps and fridges stuffed with bottles of Coke was just about as good as life could get. And for a while it probably was.

His comments reminded me of a friend of mine whose parents ran a pub in Greenwich, South London, back in the late Seventies. As teenagers we used to start our Saturday nights in the Rose & Crown with a pint or two of Directors, before heading off to sample the delights of the neighbouring boozers.

Then we'd come back to the Rose just before closing time and with the punters away to their beds we'd stay up drinking until the wee small hours of the morning. Then we'd crash out on the pub's bench seats, while our mate disappeared upstairs to his flat above the pub.

Looking back I think I was very lucky to have spent - and to have wanted to spend - my formative years in the environs of a pub. My experiences all those years ago set firmly in place my love of the British boozer. And that wasn't all. For me, as a teenager, going to the pub was the most obvious way I could aspire to being an adult.

In part it was an affirmation of becoming 'a man'. We were being allowed into an adult world and OK, we knew it was because our friend's dad ran the gaff, but we kept our noses clean and we were rubbing shoulders with grown-ups in such a way that meant we were recognised for doing our own bit of 'growing up'.

I hope that among the current crop of young 'uns who visit their local pub there are a few whose early experiences in such places establish them as a starting point for one of life's many great journeys.