In a Word...Queue
The young people outside the counter were queuing. The young people inside the counter insisted that the young people outside the counter queue. And if anyone skipped the queue, or tried to, they were ordered to the back.
Whoever heard the like?
Clearly, the young people inside the counter are so used to queuing in all situations that they have now transposed this to the pub.
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So shocked was I, I felt the need for a stiff drink. It was out of the question. I was at the end of the queue. Purgatory. Waiting. As it turned out, Godot would probably have arrived sooner.
I grew up in a pub and worked in bars during the more valuable years of my youth (there's no university as good an educator in the ways of humanity as is working behind a pub counter), so I was deeply disturbed at this wanton disruption of the natural order of things.
Who is to be master, that is the question? Bar staff or the thirsty? S/he who pays or s/he who dispenses?
In my day people lined a counter to give their drinks order to a bar staff who came to them willingly, glad (mostly) to be of help.
Now the customer must line up as though in a soup kitchen, like an unctuous supplicant awaiting the leisurely attention of his/her would-be divine superior inside the counter.
Truly, the world is on its head.
Add in mad prices and the abandonment of pubs by younger generations and you have today's reality – the wholesale disappearance of bars and public houses in Ireland.
Is it any wonder that, as figures last month disclosed,
alcohol consumption in Ireland is now at average European levels
with consumption here behind France, Spain and Austria. Another myth – that of the drinking Irish – bites the dust!
Year-on-year the decline in Irish drinking was of almost 5 per cent in 2024 alone, with a drop of 34.3 per cent since 2001. What has become of us at all?
I blame the queuing.
Queue, from French
queue
, for 'a tail'.
inaword@irishtimes.com
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