My Local - Guest Blog

When I went to France in 2008 for Christmas and New Year, we actually spent Christmas in Kent at my eldest brother's house, I drank a fair bit of local Kentish ale. One of my January posts was about the Gadd's beers that I drank while I was there, and in the comments was a new commenter for me at the time, one Mark Dredge, author of Pencil and Spoon and subsequently much lauded beer blogger. It is my pleasure then, that today Mark is my guest blogger.

I don’t have a local. Not somewhere I’d like to regularly drink that’s stumbling distance from my front door. I never have had a local. When I moved in with my girlfriend two years ago I went in search of a local and found nothing (I found pubs but not ones I’d like to drink in...). I’m moving house in a few weeks and I’ll go on the search for a local again then. I hope I find somewhere good, although I doubt I’ll go there very often.

Not having a local doesn’t bother me much. I wasn’t brought up around the pub environment so it never mattered to me. More important was spending time with family and friends. For me, being with family or friends is more important than where we actually are. I very rarely go out drinking alone. I don’t pop to the pub for a few pints and a chat with whoever is there. I’d rather sit at home with a bottle from the fridge (though solo drinking can be a fine thing).

There are pubs that I go to more often than others, so I guess these are my ‘locals’, even if they would take me over an hour to travel to from home. But I don’t work near where I live and I tend to go out near where I work. And that’s in London and London has a lot of pubs.

I’m not a monogamous drinker. I regularly return to the same places but I go because I like the beer there or want to meet friends there. A local, for me, is something that other people have. Maybe if I lived near a good pub this would be different. Maybe not.