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Oliver Cross: Gastro pubs and Chemic Tavern Coronation Street counselling workshop
Woodhouse resident and YEP columnist Oliver Cross talks gastro pubs and the Chemic Tavern Coronation Street counselling workshop.
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Potency of days
The Chemic Tavern Coronation Street counselling workshop has been extremely busy recently trying to help people through the loss of the Wednesday edition of the series, which has moved to Thursdays.
I think this sort of upheaval affects pub customers more than normal people because pub customers tend to build their lives around routines (which is why they're called regulars).
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Thursday should be Coronation Street post-mortem day but it can't be this week because all the Coronation Street gang will have gone down the telly.
I think what the flashy TV executives, dressed in their Armani suits or something similar – most Chemic customers are not exactly on home ground when it comes to naming suit brands – fail to factor in (see, I can talk like them, even if I can't dress like them) is the potency of days.
Anybody brought up in one of the regular British religious traditions should feel a sort of pang at some or several times around Friday, Saturday or Sunday; a feeling that they should be doing or feeling something different.
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Even accepting that this mostly expresses itself by queuing to get into the car park at B&Q, I think it's still there.
As a product of the mildest Anglican upbringing and a very fierce sports teacher, my pang-day is Wednesday, school sports afternoon which was, for me, a weekly exercise in failure and humiliation I've never really recovered from.
On the other hand Thursday, for the first part of my working life, was pay day; the only day of the week when I had money to throw away, which I duly did.
This is why on Wednesdays, for atavistic reasons, I tend to stay in feeling fearful and watching reassuring TV such as Coronation Street, and on Thursdays I go to the pub.
I think the Coronation Street executives who turned my mid-week habits upside-down were forgetting the first rule of constructive conservatism: Don't mess.
Call that a chip?
At last I know what a gastro-pub is; it's a pub which charges nearly 50p for one potato chip.
This is because, after our trip to Shrewsbury, we stopped at a place in deepest, most affluent, Cheshire – actually, although it sounds like I'm making this up, just down the road from a polo club.
And it was lovely; an old rambling country pub stylishly converted to eliminate the worst aspects of country pubs, such as sticky carpets, dreadful food and customers who give you looks.
We ordered, from a young waiter doing an amusing impression of David Cameron, two of the cheapest starter dishes – one mackerel and one roasted vegetable at about 10 each.
But then we thought, caution to the wind, that we could probably share some chips as well and so ordered a portion of Thick Chips at 2.95.
This was exactly six straight-sided, identical, rather short chips carefully stacked in three layers as if in the wood-block arrangement game Jenga, but obviously a lot less fun.
Shared between two, it hardly counted as food at all but the biggest objection to it was its block quality.
The glory of chips is that, cut from untidy roundish vegetables, they include both thick and thin bits and the tapering chip-ends come out extra golden and crisp.
Really, chip-ends are something not worth sacrificing in the name of tidiness and regularity, but then, what is?
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Tuesday 07 February 2012
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