(Beer) gardens of earthly delight

It’s in these rare weeks of hot weather that I remember I have a garden. Once I’ve raked up bags of leaves, cleaned out the pond (and gathered up the faded bottles from last year’s final barbecue) it becomes an extra room to the house. For a brief, golden time, most of our meals consist of barbecued meat and salad.

There’s the tinkle of the waterfall into the pond, the smell of lavender, the coloured flashes of butterflies and bees, and only the incessant itching of mosquito bites to ruin the mood. A cold glass of something tasty and something absorbing to read, and you’re on holiday for less than a tenner.

My tiny, fleeting patch of alfresco idyll keeps me away from the pub. Not enough pubs near me have beer gardens, and many that do treat them as an afterthought, somewhere for kids and smokers to irritate each other.

The pub with the best beer garden has cloudy ale and arsey barstaff, so we’re more likely to invite mates we would normally see in the pub to bring a bottle back to our garden instead.

Relaxed drinking​
As part of the complex web of frustration and self-loathing that makes up our national psyche, we seem to be rather down on the whole notion of enjoying ourselves in outdoor spaces. (Admit it — you thought I was a smug git in the opening paragraph above, didn’t you?)

Remember Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for ‘Continental drinking’? It’s 10 years now since the 2003 Licensing Act that did away with the restrictions on pub opening hours that were introduced to sober up World War One munitions workers. What began as a perfectly sensible measure to encourage more relaxed drinking spaces became scorned after the Continental comparison.

We thought this was another illustration of Blair’s nouveau tendencies, a sign of New Labour’s grating pretentiousness. Saying the great British pub should be more like a Parisian street café was as unlikable as cutting your sandwiches diagonally rather than straight across, or serving Tuesday’s evening meal on the best crockery with a napkin.

On the first anniversary of the Act’s 2005 implementation, newspapers noted with dismay that the Great British public had not begun sipping pastis and discussing Sartre on British pavements, and declared it a failure.

All of which missed the point  entirely. The Continentals are simply better at drinking outside than we are, and that really needs to change. Outdoor drinking creates a completely different mentality.

Continental​

We all know about the perils of vertical drinking, best encapsulated by the nightclub experience — nowhere to sit, drink in hand because there’s nowhere to put it down, and music so loud you can’t talk — all coercing us to drink quicker, and more anxiously.

If you’re sitting down, chatting with friends, you drink slower. If you’re outside on a terrace, leaning back expansively, interspersing conversation with watching the world go by, you drink slower still.

This is how Continental drinking works. And the most curious aspect of it, compared to the British experience, is that the architecture of towns and cities actively promotes it in a way that’s much rarer here.

Pedestrianised narrow streets comfortably accommodate terraces. More than that, elegant town squares allow ranks of seating to face each other across the kind of space that makes people walk slower as they enter it, the surrounding architecture soothing you and making you more contemplative.

People often dismiss such outdoor delights on the grounds that they could never work here because of the rain. Belgium is just as grey and wet, but is one of the best places for outdoor drinking because of these things they have called umbrellas. Yes, you say, but it’s too cold here. Yeah? In Denmark they have blankets on the backs of chairs, and people snuggle up on the street when it’s below zero.

We don’t have to wait until these rare heatwaves for pub beer gardens to come into their own. If you’re lucky enough to have one at your pub and it spends most of the year resembling a prison exercise yard full of fag butts and empty kegs, you might be missing a trick.

Think about mood rather than simple practicality, and it could be making you money even when the rain comes back.

If you don’t like the idea of cloaking the magic of the British pub beneath some bourgeois concept of Continental drinking, then why not steal the best bits of it and make them our own?