I am enjoying the book A Land of Two Halves enormously!
I will share a bit of it with you, which is obviously © Joe Bennett, but is also very funny and concerns his experience of a British-style pub in Queenstown, which we also went in. He manages to be spot on, a little bit sexist and in full agreement with me in the space of three short paragraphs...
It's an Old English pub which, of course, is neither old nor English but it does employ a barmaid so cheerless, discourteous, inattentive, inefficient and unremittingly idle that there is almost no point in asking her where she's from. But I do.
"Barnstaple," she says, and manages to turn its three syllables into "fuck off".
Lots of English people know exactly how to serve. Indeed they do so with both wit and an unrefreshing absence of unctuousness or corporate obidience. Nevertheless, if you encounter a bad shop assistant, or barman, or ticket-seller, a seriously bad one, anywhere in the world, the chances are that he or she, and it's probably she, will be English.
He meets up with a friend, Nico, in the pub later...
Late in the evening, Nico bets me that I can't make Miss Barnstaple laugh. I devote twenty minutes to the task. And lose.
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