Pub crawls What is the best way to become accepted into English life? Swear allegiance to the Queen? Eat salty fish and chips and drink weak tea? Learn the rules of cricket? No. The surest way to become an honorary English citizen is to go on a pub crawl. We love our beer, but are a moderate nation, and do not like to spend every evening in one pub having drink after drink. So, some evenings, we do something different. We spend an evening having one drink in pub after pub. In a few hours, you share details of your life with strangers, who become close friends. You are accepted into a social circle. You just hope that they were so drunk, they can't remember what you said the next day. This is a nation of pubs. There are over 120,000 in England - enough to visit 10 every night for 32 years. Because we are moderate, pubs must stop serving at 11pm and you must drink up by 11.20pm. This is to stop people drinking all night, like in France. We drink the same amount as the French, we just drink it all before 11.20pm. Pub crawls are rarely planned. They just happen. Nobody says 'How about a pub crawl tonight?'. When work finishes, someone might glance at the clock and say, 'Fancy a quick drink?'. This is a probable invitation to a pub crawl. They say it as if the idea just came, but in fact they have been planning it since the morning. The correct response is for everyone to look doubtful, and to study their watches. 'Well - yes, just a quick one,' you say, as if you have important things to do later on. Next, people will suggest a pub to start in, so you should know something about English pubs. Pubs are either 'tied houses', which can only sell a single company's beers (and a few 'guest beers'); or 'free houses'. These do not serve free beer. It means they are free to sell any company's beer. But more important is to know your pub types: 1. Old person's pubs. Name such as 'Red Lion', 'Rose and Crown', 'Railway Inn'. Ancient decor. Cold, smell of damp walls and stale beer. No music. Outside toilets. Silent local men inside. Beer is sometimes very good. Food is out of freezer, microwaved, and awful. 2. Young person's pubs. Silly names: 'Ferret and Firkin', 'Kebab and Calculator'. Completely redecorated this year. Very hot, smell of teenage perfume and aftershave. Very loud rock music. Toilets always full. Shouting young locals inside. Beer usually mediocre. Food is out of freezer, microwaved, and awful. 3. Middle-aged person's pubs. Artificial names such as 'The Jolly Ploughman'. Look like traditional old farmhouses inside, but all done this year. Air-conditioned. Full of men in suits and quiet easy-listening music. Beer variable. Food is out of freezer, microwaved, and awful. For a pub crawl, type 1 is the best. Visits are interesting, but a little sinister. When you try to sit down, the landlord says, 'You can't sit there. That's Old Tom's chair.' When you ask which one is Tom so you can apologise, he says, 'Oh, Tom's not here. He moved to Australia in 1984.' The Round System It is considered bad manners to buy only your own beer. When a group of people enter a pub, one person buys drinks for everyone - a round. In England, we like to be fair. So in order to be fair, everyone else in the group then has to buy a round as well, one by one. This is what turns the 'quick drink' into a pub crawl. Suppose there are five people in the group. By the time the fifth person has bought a round, one of the group might have left, and another joined. One person might have missed out a drink, or another had a soft drink when everyone else had beer. It is not clear whose round it is, or what the round should be. So everything starts again. The best plan is to offer to buy the first round. It is simplest, and ensures instant respect. (It is a deep insult in England to say that someone doesn't buy their round. Jokes such as 'He joined the company in 1993 - about the time he last bought a round' are probably serious insults too.) Which beer? Of course you can have whisky, but beer is most authentic. For the first round of a pub crawl, there is a ritual. Everyone will say, 'Just a half for me'. The person buying the round insists: 'Are you sure? Can't I get you a pint?' Everyone reluctantly agrees to a pint. For the rest of the evening everyone drinks pints. Though Britain's 'Big Six' breweries produce the majority of beer, there are also hundreds of smaller independent breweries, some local, some national. Some are 'bitter' (dark beer), some lager, some 'stout' (black, like Guinness) some 'India Pale Ale' etc. Some are 'keg beer' (carbonated and stored in metal casks, clean tasting but characterless) some 'real ale' (not carbonated and stored in wooden casks, less reliable but more interesting tastes). Some are bottled, some are draught, pulled from the pumps displayed on the bar. This makes it very confusing in a strange pub: which beer to buy from the six or seven on offer? The easy answer is to buy the first round and have whatever someone else is having. Or to ask the person behind the bar for a recommendation. Or just to have the one with the most ridiculous name: usually the more bizarre its name, the stronger it is. When you get home, or when you tell friends about it the next day, you never say, 'I went on a pub crawl to 10 pubs'. Instead, you should say casually, 'Oh, we had a few'. We English are a very moderate nation.

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