The perfect drinking companion is a difficult thing to acquire. Over the last two years, I’ve cycled between Nottinghamshire communists, a Wrexham-born investment banker, a Dulwich College-educated think-tanker and a few others in between. My quest has not been successful, despite the relentlessness with which I’ve pursued it. Perhaps the perfect drinking companion is not a fellow human, but rather man’s best friend. I’ve considered a public house having its own dog a sign of a decent enough boozer for a while, but there is a phenomenon I’ve been noticing more and more of late that I’m unsure of the meaning of. Pub cats.
The perfect drinking companion is a difficult thing to acquire.
I am not sure when the cat entered the pub. The dog has always seemed to have a reason to be there. A dog in a pub is a dog doing something. Smaller ones like terriers lay beneath regulars’ stools, border collies stretch out on their bed by the bar, lurchers drape themselves in front of fireplaces. I prefer the enormous ones with names like Buster or Duke. However, the cat is different. There is nothing pleasant about a cat sitting under your stool, or by the bar, or in front of the fireplace. They smell, and leave hair everywhere, and are always one loud noise away from knocking over your drink.
I don’t mind cats ordinarily, but their presence in a pub is unnatural and unnerving. The only hospitality venue they belong in is that disgusting cat cafe in Nottingham. I’ve been noticing more and more of them in pubs recently, but thankfully this appears to be limited primarily to London and pubs in other cities that want to charge as much as they do in London.
My local has neither a dog nor a cat, so I went to Deptford to visit a boozer with a cat and speak with one myself. When I was at the bar waiting in that awkward minute in between the first and second pour of the Guinness, the bartender introduced him as if he were a minor aristocrat. He had a name, but I’ll be damned if I give that attention-seeker a namecheck in His Majesty’s Spectator. All pub cats have names now. Nobody ever says ‘There’s our cat.’ It’s always, ‘Wahey, there’s Colin!’ or ‘Look who it is! Mabel!’ as though the animal was an actual regular.
The pub was a nice enough one, and a pint of Guinness set you back a pretty reasonable £4.80. It did not need a cat, yet it had one. He sat next to me as I sipped my stout by the window, looking at me with his beady little eyes. The cat looked at my pint. I looked at the cat. The cat looked at me. I was clearly a strange and unwanted trespasser in his territory. That is the main issue. The whole point of The British Pub is that there’s a shared understanding, a mutual recognition that nobody in there wants to go home yet. The pub dog understands that. The pub dog is disappointed to see you leave. The cat wants you to go home.
I genuinely believe that the slight decline of dogs in pubs, and the astronomical rise of pub cats, is completely linked and contributory to the decline of British pubs and British society. I have no facts or statistics to back this up, but that’s never stopped me before. I put this to the free house feline sitting next to me, but he had very little to say on the matter. Cat must have got his tongue. I considered ordering another beer, maybe even a Purrroni, if you will, but I did not.
This pub and its cat were a reasonably anonymous one, known only to the most dedicated of Facebook’s London drinking groups, so I think that’s why it was fine. The celebrity statuses of Penny the cat at the Pelton Arms in Greenwich, a fine pub itself, and the elusive white kitty at the Hole in the Wall in Waterloo are in themselves an attraction, a distraction from the serious work of drinking.
It seems that my quest for the perfect drinking companion, my Moon Under the Water, continues. I remain hopeful. Although, if it carries on like this, I may have to return to Deptford. At least he didn’t tell me my jokes were shit.
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