According to G.K. Chesterton, the act of getting to and from a pub is central to an understanding of British life and landscape. With around 60,000 to choose from, he may have had a point. So bon viveur, pub singer and writer Ian Marchant set off with photographer Perry Venus on a gruelling month long British pub crawl, to go to and from a lot of pubs in order to test Chesterton's hypothesis. Not for the intrepid travellers the lame Lands End to John O'Groats route so beloved of Beefy Botham, people in chicken suits, etc.
The reviews are pretty good (you can find reviews at the page linked above). Some excerpts:
That may sound like a cue for lots of drunken high-jinks, but it isn't. , Marchant doesn't go for easy laughs. He uses his boozy odyssey to piece together a social history of drinking in Britain that goes a long way towards explaining why we are a nation of anti-social, violent drunks. The Scotsman.
Agree or disagree, there's no denying Marchant is just the kind of bloke you'd like to meet down the pub: a great talker, a controversialist whenever things dull over, and handy with his fists when need be. And actually, there's not that much to argue with him about. Daily Telegraph.
Marchant is much more the poet. For him the night sky is "like a child's card, the Milky Way a smear of PVA". In Cornwall, he writes, the "natives feel about visitors the way I feel about sand under my foreskin". In a bravura passage describing twine in hop fields he writes: "The whole effect was like a Cartesian graph in string, and as we moved through the hop grounds the straight lines joining the co-ordinates seemed to converge to form insubstantial curves." His range of reference is deep-drawn and refreshing: GK Chesterton, Stewart Home, George Borrow. The Guardian.
