Drink - Victoria Moore finds out what the lads are talking about
Men are turning into big girl's blouses. That is, according to a report by Whitbread's Hogshead pub chain. Their evidence comes from over 100 bar staff who, across a 24-hour period, monitored the chit-chat of their male customers and discovered that they're more likely to exchange gossip, Ena Sharples-style, than they are to boast about the finer points of their own performance between the sheets. A pity, really, because one does like to think that the least they're doing is picking up some tips as they sink the beers.
Hogshead pubs are prime laddish territory. That is why the report is so astonishing. Clothes and personal appearance manage to bumper in at joint third place along with DIY and football. Personal appearance I can understand. Just imagine the quantity of playground joshing that goes on whenever any lad gets a new pair of specs. Or a haircut. But DIY? Surely that went out with the ark. If there were a flood now, most men wouldn't even be able to select the right drill bit, let alone create something watertight. Perhaps that's why they only talk about it.
Sex slithers in at a libido-less ninth. Mark Jones, the managing director of the chain, hilariously tried to trumpet this as proof that "men are more sensitive than some might have thought". My arse, as Jim Royle might say and, indeed, as the 40 per cent of Hogshead pub managers who are female appear to have said. "They were really surprised to see that sex didn't feature more highly," admitted Mr Jones. Perhaps that's because they endure men all night every night, and they know not to take a stray, lascivious "Could do with some of those in my office, luv" as a piece of work talk.
But the real shock is that men in pubs talk at all, let alone with enough coherence for their conversations to be categorised. I've heard my brother on the telephone to his mates, and his conversations go something like this: "A'right Nozzer? . . . yeah . . . yeah . . . monster . . . no way . . . got this beast turbo . . . seen Boz's bike? Wicked." This exchange of suspended words that passes for communication can continue indefinitely. I can't imagine that it gets any more sophisticated when his brain cells are stimulated with glasses of cement mixer, the favourite drink of his co-mechanics at the local garage. (For the uninitiated, that's lime juice mixed with Bailey's Irish Cream, swilled in your mouth until the two liquids coagulate and you gag on the solids when you try and swallow.)
My latest love possesses a similar ability to dispense with anything from a long divorce saga to those irritating work incidents which, in my view, demand blow-by-blow recounting ("so I sent him an e-mail and cc-ed it to . . . ") for full catharsis, in between a few mouthfuls. The relationship discussion goes like this. Friend: "Things going all right with Victoria?" Sip. LL: "Yeah, you know." Sip. Friend: "Nice pint." Sip. LL: "Yeah." Relapse into silence. And that's it. Sometimes there's a telling jerk of the eyebrow, or a guilty, serpentine flickering of an eyelid. How even the nosiest, most sensationalist of spying barmen could call this a conversation, let alone claim it had any content, I don't know.
Of course, in pubs in gentrified-to-the-hilt places like Fulham, it's an altogether different story. I slip into a place cruelly nicknamed "The Sloaney Pony", where I am witness to several impressively long and cogent dialogues. "Ah yes, how is Gillon? Haven't seen him for ages," says one pukka gentleman to another before embarking on a complex discourse on domain names and the web. But then I notice that they are drinking white wine spritzers, so they probably don't count as real men anyway. In another pub, round the corner, I find proper beer drinkers. I sidle towards them for a bit of earwigging. Sadly, though, they're such proper beer drinkers that they don't speak at all. After a couple of hours, I'm so bored that I've had to alcohol myself into an oblivion rapturous enough to make their snorted requests for more bitter sound like a full-scale orchestra.
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