Drink Yourself Fitter - Run To The Pub

Duncan Black performing at Y Fricsan in 2009

I drove past what was Y Fricsan in Cwm-Y-Glo yesterday. It used to be a pub and it got me thinking: There was a time when Britain knew what mattered. We saved the whale. We saved the children. We even saved with the Woolwich (and look how that turned out). Now, dear reader, we must turn our attention to a far more pressing humanitarian crisis: the slow, dignified extinction of the North Wales pub.

In Wales, around 60 pubs a year are closing. Sixty. That’s one every six days. By the time you finish reading this, statistically speaking, a landlord somewhere will have turned off the lights, pulled down the blinds, and whispered “last orders” to the empty ghosts of quiz nights past. Rising costs, energy bills that resemble phone numbers, and the government taxing drinkers like they’re funding a small moon landing haven’t helped. But we must also address the twin villains of modern virtue: Dry January and Sober October — two months a year when the nation collectively decides water is “actually quite refreshing”. Disgraceful.

Take Y Fricsan, tucked away in Cwm-y-Glo between Llanrug and Llanberis, crouched heroically at the foot of Snowdonia like a pint glass shielding itself from the wind. To most people, it’s as unknown as the correct pronunciation of its postcode. But to those who’ve been, it was a cathedral of character: low ceilings, high spirits, and a guestbook that migrated onto the plaster above your head. If the signatures on the ceiling could talk, they’d mostly ask for another round.

I went there many years ago to watch some bands, the place was rammed for a fundraiser to save the pub!. Five pounds a head, shoulder-to-shoulder, sweat-on-sweat solidarity. A joyous, hopeful injection of cash. Which, in pub economics, is roughly equivalent to putting a sticking plaster on the Titanic. Because pubs don’t survive on charity weekends. They survive on Tuesdays. On accidental Thursdays. On the sacred ritual of “just popping in”. They survive on habit.

And this is where the Great National Abstinence Conspiracy comes in. Every January, millions of people discover sparkling water and begin using the word “mindful” unironically. Every October, the same people post pictures of herbal tea like they’ve discovered fire. For two entire months, the country collectively decides pubs are optional. Imagine running a café where everyone boycotted coffee in March and September. Imagine a barber where nobody cut their hair in June and December. Actually, bad example — some of us tried that during lockdown and still haven’t recovered.

The truth is simple: pubs run on winter. They run on dark nights and sideways rain. They run on the phrase, “It’s miserable outside so we might as well.” And right when they need you most, you’re at home sniffing kombucha and congratulating yourself for drinking sparkling sadness.

The future of places like Y Fricsan doesn’t lie in nostalgic Facebook posts that begin with “Remember when…”. It lies with the regulars: the drunks, hikers, holidaymakers, and, yes, the occasional dick head who trudge out of the rain and order another round. The midweek pint brigade. The Sunday lingerers. The “go on then, just the one” crowd who never mean it. Without them, the pub becomes a memory and Britain becomes a country where the most exciting night out is a supermarket meal deal and a documentary about Pub Closures.

So here’s a modest, sensible, entirely reasonable proposal. If you must take two months off drinking every year — and apparently you must — then let’s apply some basic logistics. Move them. Shift your noble abstinence to February and November: the cold, miserable post-Christmas financial wasteland and the pre-Christmas financial panic. Months when nobody needs help staying sober because they’re already broke and emotionally exhausted. Leave January and October alone. Let pubs have the months they actually need.

Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tell that bloke who keeps posting about his step count. This year we drink for Britain. We drink for Wales. We drink for the survival of sticky carpets and questionable jukeboxes. We drink for the little pubs clinging to the mountains, that is sadly now a Bakehouse (whatever that is).

Cancel Dry January. Sack off Sober October. If you must be virtuous, be virtuous in February and November when everyone else is hammering the pubs anyway. Because if we don’t, the next thing we’ll be saving won’t be whales or children — it’ll be the last pub standing. 🍻