Drinking (with) Games.
As a kid, every October half term Mum, Dad, my brother David and I would head to Devon with family friends who had kids too - Tom and George, who were the same age as us. The holiday house we rented was an old barn with one vast downstairs room that held the kitchen, dining area, and lounge. Against the wall sat a ping pong table that could be slid into the middle of the room, fuelling endless games of winner-stays-on: boys vs. girls, parents vs. kids, and every variation in between. I liked ping pong well enough, but down in the West Country my real love was skittles.
The Old Courthouse pub in Chulmleigh sat on a narrow residential street in the middle of town. Solid beige stone, thatched roof, built in 1633, it supposedly took its name from when Charles I once stayed there and held court. If I had a pound for every pub that claimed a passing monarch or dignitary, I’d have enough for at least a few pints, even at London prices. I can’t really recall the interior of the pub itself; the real action was through the cobbled back yard, in what must once have been an old stable block.
Inside, a modest room was fitted with a strip of maroon industrial-grade lino and a black wooden ball-return chute along the wall. I loved everything about it, the competition with friends and family, the shit-talking, the thud of the ball launched down the alley, the clatter of falling skittles. Best of all, the landlord happily turned a blind eye when us older kids - Tom and I, about fourteen at the time were sent in with our parents’ cash to buy four-pint pitchers of beer. We ferried them out back to keep everyone refreshed, and we were even allowed half-pints ourselves. Only half pints mind, never a full pint at a time. It felt impossibly grown-up to walk to the bar and order an actual beer, something I wouldn’t be legally entitled to do for another four years.
I’d been allowed the odd stubby or a splash of wine with meals on holidays before, we’re a middle-class family from the south east and all that, but this was different. This was my first taste of pub beer. I don’t remember what it was, likely Butcombe or Exmoor Gold in that part of the world but it didn’t matter. It was pub beer. Hallowed, age-restricted, illicit pub beer. And, it was glorious. I haven’t looked back since.
Fast-forward twenty years, and I had possibly the best beer-and-games experience of my life. Again, it involved skittles. For my brother’s stag do in Cologne, someone had booked a bar with a basement alley. This was no ordinary nine-pin: it was ‘Schere’ skittles, meaning scissors. The alley curved slightly concave and narrowed to a mere 35cm in the middle before widening again for the pins tricky when sober. Even harder after a few beers.
On the wall was a button. In the fog of mild stag-do oafishness, ‘someone’ pressed it. Nothing happened. Relief. It might’ve been a panic alarm. Five minutes later, however, a smartly dressed waiter in a white apron descended the stairs carrying a kranz: the upside-down umbrella contraption holding thin glasses of chilled Kölsch, as is traditional in Cologne.
“You want beers?” he asked. A few blank looks, then we shrugged and accepted. Never look a gift horse in the mouth and all that. He scuttled back upstairs. Conversation rippled “Who went to the bar?” “Who paid?” Nobody had. Ten minutes later the penny dropped, the button summoned the waiter for beers. He’d mark them on a tab; we’d settle up later. Needless to say, that button got a workout that afternoon. Round after round of crisp, tiny glasses of Kölsch flowed, fuelling an increasingly shambolic display of skittles.
More fun followed later that night, but nothing, for me, surpassed those carefree hours underground talking nonsense, sledging each other, and drinking perhaps a little too enthusiastically.
The hangover the next morning was brutal. While the others tucked into breakfast at a café, I stood outside clutching a bottle of water I couldn’t bear to drink, staring blankly into the mid distance for a good forty-five minutes. There are photos of me gazing at a traffic island of existential despair. I still haven’t lived it down.