Power of the press

Our local paper, the Southport Visiter (sic), has published an on-line list of our best local pubs, and I was pleased to see my local, the Guest House in Union Street, come top. The full list is here. I wouldn't necessarily agree with the entire list; there are some I wouldn't have included and others that are surprising omissions, such as the Zetland, the Mount Pleasant, the Bold (in Churchtown), the Hesketh and the Freshfield. That said, we're quite fortunate in Southport for having some good pubs locally, which is often not the case in seaside towns: at union conferences, we found Blackpool and Bournemouth particularly deficient in this respect.

It's good that our local paper is supporting local pubs. For just over a year, CAMRA has been given a weekly column, which has mostly been written by local CAMRA stalwart, Mike Perkins and, until my previous computer broke down, I contributed several articles, which can be found here. Now that I'm on-line again, I intend to write more; for one thing, Mike could do with a break. I know from my period of editor of local CAMRA magazine, Ale & Hearty, that the local Branch likes to have a magazine and the newspaper column but, with a couple of exceptions, don't feel obliged to lend a hand. I've spoken to a couple of editors in other Branches who have had similar experiences. Regrettably, the tendency to dump tasks on individuals is by no means confined to CAMRA: many mass membership organisations tend to leave the bulk of the work to an individual or small group. Sometimes the individuals concerned prefer it that way, but mostly not.

The list is derived from CAMRA's What Pub website.