Mark Daniels: It's all about the experience...

On Thursday, I had a tiny car crash.

This resulted in me sitting around for a while waiting for a recovery truck to turn up and cart my broken bits of Chrysler Grand Voyager off to the great car park in the sky.

It also taught me that recovery truck drivers, like London's Black Cab drivers, have a profound sense of knowledge on a great variety of subjects. Including, it seemed on Thursday, the pub trade.

"So you own a pub," he said. "Is it really as hard to make money in pubs these days as you lot make out?"

I wasn't in the mood to indulge in a conversation about the great and good of the pub trade. To be honest, I was still trying to figure out how I was going to explain to my wife that I'd written the car off on the side of an ambulance that had been on an emergency call. After all, it's not like something all bright green, yellow and orange with flashing blue lights and a wailing siren is difficult to miss, is it?

But then the breakdown lorry driver said something that caught my attention: "I blame the supermarkets."

"Really?" I was shocked.

"Of course," he said, emphatically. "I mean, it's always been cheaper to buy your booze in an offie, but the difference between pub and supermarket now is so much it's ridiculous. How're you meant to compete?"

Amusingly, I found myself almost defending the supermarkets: "well, alcohol will - and should - always be cheaper in supermarkets," I argued. "After all, when you come to the pub you're paying for more than just the beer itself."

My lorry driver friend nodded. "Oh, I know that, but what are you offering to make us want to come in?"

Beer garden? "I have a garden at home." Home cooked food? "Why do you lot tell me you've got home cooked food? If I wanted to eat that, I'd eat at home." Sky TV. "Most of you haven't got it any more, you're all moaning it's too expensive." Great atmosphere? "My mates don't come down any more 'cos they can't smoke."

I know my arguments were weak because I was distracted by the circumstances of how I'd got to be talking to him in the first place, but as I climbed from the cab and prepared to watch him carry the bits of my car off in to the sunset, he left me with one final piece of wisdom: "I don't mind paying three quid for a pint of beer, but you've got to make it worth my while coming down."

Ironically, on Friday - one day after wrecking an ambulance - I was carted off to hospital in the back of one. There's no need to bore you with the details of the abuse my gall bladder had heaped upon my common bile duct, but one of the nurses who looked after me was quite interested in my chosen profession.

"You know," she said, "those supermarkets can't be making life easy for you."

"Supermarkets?" I mumbled through the mask on my face. How could she be talking to me about the beer trade while I was trying to throw up in her face?

"I quite agree with the government's idea of forcing them to put their price up. It's not very sensible of them to be selling alcohol so cheaply."

This, of course, was coming from somebody who probably spends a good chunk of her day dealing with people who've had a touch too much to drink.

"Mind you," she said, "none of the pubs around me are that good. When I go in the staff are miserable, over winter it was cold because the owner said he couldn't afford the heating and next month all they're going to do is show football. I went in one place last week that advertised good food and it was thoroughly rubbish. It's not good when you're paying for something you're not getting."

As they prepared to discharge me later she came back. "You know, it's not really the price in the pubs that annoys us as customers. It's the poor experience we get when we come in that often puts us off."

So I've spent most of the bank holiday weekend feeling pretty beaten up, in one way or another. Surely pubs aren't THAT bad, are they?

I, like many others, am proud of my pub and what I achieve with it. But it did get me thinking: the general public seem to recognise supermarkets are part of the root cause of alcohol problems, but they also want us to offer them something special in order to get them out of their sofas and back into the pubs.

The Recovery Truck driver and the Nurse said so.

The Gateway to Heaven...

Did anybody see the final ever episode of Ashes to Ashes a couple of weeks ago?

I'm torn between whether we've got some positive marketing behind the idea that pubs are the gateway to heaven, or if Gene Hunt is going to be in trouble for promoting binge drinking in the eternal afterlife...