Pete Brown: What I love about pubs

"So, Pete, is this the death of the pub?"

The radio presenter leans forward and knits his brow, simultaneously making a winding up gesture. I have to be quick.

"Absolutely not," I reply, closing yet another conversation about the power of PubCos, the smoking ban, the recession, supermarket pricing, the changing face of the home and the spectre of neo-prohibitionism. "The pub has been the focus of British social life for a thousand years. It's absurd to think we might suddenly lose it in the next ten or twenty."

It's my stock answer. But for the first time, I wonder if I sound truly confident saying it.

A week later I'm in Liverpool with some people from the brewing industry. They're sponsoring the city's beer festival and invited me to say a few words at the opening. After speeches and beers there was a meal and more beers, and now we're in a pub, our evening flapping in the wind like a sail in mid-tack, random and full of energy, with the faintest possibility that we just might lose control of it completely, but probably won't.

We're having an argument as we stand at the bar, pints in hand: can you call this place a boozer or not? Someone insists that it's a traditional pub, but that's not necessarily the same thing as a boozer. Someone else argues that it's neither - it's a student pub, which prompts a third person to argue that in that case, it must be a bar rather than a pub.

One of our number, a native Scouser who hasn't lived here for years, is flushed with pride at being back on his own turf. Several times throughout the evening, he sweeps an arm wide to indicate Liverpool, and starts a sentence with "Where else would you find…" before pointing out another manifestation of the city's effortless cool or gritty down-to-earth eccentricity.

Now, in this student bar/pub/boozer on a damp street corner on the edge of Toxteth, he surveys the room and his eyes light up once more. "Where else would you get three young blokes wearing three different kinds of hats? Look, that one's got a flat cap, there's a trilby over there, and he's wearing a Dutch seaman's cap."

I look around the room to locate the three hats, and I think: London. Or Southampton, or Nottingham, or Bristol or Sheffield. In fact anywhere where there's a thriving pub culture. Where else would you get this mix of people, dressed like this, behaving like this? He means it as a rhetorical question, and it is - just not in there way he thinks it is. Where else would you get this, other than a brilliant pub?

It's not just the hats. A bloke wearing lustrous dark ringlets, a beard and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt sips a pint of lager. He's chatting to a girl about half his size who's wearing a man's jacket, a flowery miniskirt and a Joy Division T-shirt, and drinking a half of Guinness. Neither of them were born when the bands they advertise were in their prime. They wander over to join some friends around a trivia machine, stooping to read the questions. The guy in the dusty charity shop trilby is having an intense, earnest conversation with flat cap guy, who has a goatee and sleepy eyes and nods sagely, watched by a student who has no idea she possesses supermodel looks, because no one has ever told her.

In the improvisational comedy show, Whose Line is it Anyway? audience members had to shout out random concepts, and the comedians had to somehow work those concepts together into a sketch that made some kind of surreal sense. I imagine that even in their prime, the Tony Slattery, Ryan Styles and the Canadian bloke with the beard might have struggled a bit if they'd been handed: Chinese New Year; a 1920s jazz quartet; a pint of Scottish real ale.

But this pub unites these concepts so successfully that the union seems perfectly normal. The windows and the chandeliers were hung with red and gold paper lanterns for Chinese New Year, and while they're looking a bit dusty, there seems no good reason to take them down yet. The band in the corner are playing very passable 1920s jazz, and I suppose in a city like Liverpool you've really got to try a bit harder than busking Beatles covers. And real ale just seems like the thing to be drinking here.

"Oh my God, what are you DOING?"

A tiny girl, Charlene Tilton from Dallas with a thick Scouse accent, is standing next to me at the bar, her horrified gaze scrutinising the ale-stained piece of paper on which I've just written the words 'Whose line is it anyway - three random concepts' in worsening scrawl.

"What are you DEWIN'? Why're you writin' in a PUB?" She's staring at my face now, searching for evidence of some kind of weird perversion.

I could explain. I could tell her that it's what I do. That to write about pubs often means writing in them, and writing about beer often means writing while drinking. I could explain that I've got a deadline for my monthly column for the Publican, and that I didn't have a clue what to write about until just now. That the everyday randomness of this pub - one of fifty two thousand, most of which are just as good but in entirely different ways - reminded me with incredible force just how benign well run pubs are, how much joy and simple contentment they inspire in people, how they provide a stage on which we can each be who we want to be. I could finish by telling her that here, the very idea of the 'death of the pub' feels utterly absurd.

But Charlene's not listening. She's trying to read what I've written again. And suddenly I see myself through her eyes, and decide that even by the eccentric standards around me, at midnight on a Thursday, as the band gets a little looser and the talk among my colleagues completes its mutation from business discussion to pub banter, I must look a bit weird standing at a bar frowning and scribbling on tattered and stained scraps of A4.

I shrug, put my pen away, turn to my colleagues and say, "Right, my round."