Disruption ahead

We hear the news. Our village pub is going to be closed for renovations. It will once more have bedrooms as it did in the 17^th century.

We’ve known for a year or so the place was going to be done up. It is once more to be a fully functioning hotel. The bar area is to be extended, loos & kitchen improved, the garden easier for wheelchair users. That’s on top of a new roof & various essential repairs that have been needed for years. It has been badly neglected by previous owners.

However, our landlord had thought the work would be done with the pub still functioning as a pub. We were rather sceptical, feeling they would surely need to close for some of the time as inevitably there will be a lot of noise & rubble around, which might be dangerous for any customers, especially the elderly & disabled. Yesterday we were told the decision has been made to close for 3-6 months starting in September.

On a Monday, we regularly meet up with two other couples & Tony M, the power station worker, at the village pub. Much of yesterday’s visit was spent trying to decide where we should meet up during the closure.

There are three other pubs in the village, one by the port which would mean everyone driving there except Tony, one with some foul-mouthed locals, & one dominated by big screens & is expected to be closed for refurbishment at the same time. Which to try? We think of other places. There’s another pub not too far away but that has the sort of reputation we wouldn’t feel happy to leave our less than two year old car in the car park. It’s in a deprived area with many drug addicts, disgruntled youth & petty criminals so we question what state our car would be in when we were ready to go home. Snatchems, a pub most of us would happily go to, is out of the way, especially for Tony who travels on a bicycle. Do we try a Morecambe pub? That would be on the way home for Tony & on the bus route for those nervous of driving. I can see when the pub closes we’ll be doing a tour of different venues different weeks until we find somewhere we can all feel reasonably happy in. We just hope our usual venue isn’t going to be spoilt in the renovations, no big screens or loud music, & we will be able to go back again at the end of the work.

Saddest of all, was when we inquired as to what will happen to the staff if the place is going to be closed for so long. Most are to be made redundant. Four key workers are to be kept somehow, two bar staff, two kitchen staff, but that doesn’t include the landlord, who at present doesn’t know what his position will be. This really upsets us as we’ve finally found a good landlord, who was making the pub improve its standards & attract more visitors. He’s settling in nicely & we’re gaining a certain affection for him. At the moment he fears he’s looking forward to unemployment. We’d thought he would be regarded as a key worker, maybe doing some fill-in work for other pubs in the chain when landlords wanted holidays or were ill. He’d certainly been looking forward to overseeing the transformation & building up the business once the work was done. At the moment it seems not.