Wetherspoons, where nobody knows your name

In life I think we should all be allowed one problematic pleasure, one guilty piece of art we drag from the flaming bin fire of the personal life of the artist who made it. Maybe your love for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory means you skip past Roald Dahl’s anti-Semitism. Or Annie Hall is so good and YES you KNOW, but why must Diane Keaton suffer. Or maybe you just really love The Cosby Show. We all get one.

For me, there is one source of joy I cannot let go of despite the terrible legacy of the person who created it: Wetherspoons.

Yes, Wetherspoons, we don’t use Spoons in this house - put some respect on their name.

Let me explain this wonder in case you either live outside the UK or you live in the UK but need a reminder of the prized jewel in your crown that you take for granted.

Wetherspoons is a chain pub created by Tim Martin, a man who looks like a police photofit of a Victorian night terror. He will comfortably have the worst opinions on everything. But enough about the man, what of his creation?

Lockdown was tough on Tim Martin.

When you walk into Wetherspoons, the first sign that true folk magic is afoot is the Tardis-like quality of the building. Outside, you’d easily mistake it for a regular boozer but push through the front door and you stumble into a space so big, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for Narnia. Plus, there’s all the old fur coats, it’s 12pm and there’s a bare-chested old man with a red nose who answers to name Mr. Tumnus.

Wetherspoons are so big, I’m confident if you were to find yourself homeless, they’d let you move in. Not only because they don’t judge but because it would simply take them too long to find you. By the time they did, you’d have time to pack your tent up, stamp out your fire and dismantle the portable shower, all before staff found their way back to the bar to check with a supervisor. In some pubs, they give you a horse and plot of land with every pint. Go West my son! I’ve seen Wetherspoons in some Northern cities with actual grazing buffalo.

A Wetherspoons pub welcomes everyone because anyone can afford to be there; it has menus the size of old treasure maps and every item costs 50p. It’s a soup kitchen with a liquor licence, a car boot sale of booze, a Disneyland for alcoholics, a Alton Towers for people who can’t see their kids anymore. The prices are like their toilets and views on women: cheerfully stuck in the 1970s. There are children happily getting rounds in with their pocket money, before they head back to the learning area that is the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire quiz machine.

The staff come from all around the world to work in this happy kingdom, ready to add a cheeky vodka chaser to your pint because you seem a bit down. They have a concierge service where they hold your hair back if you’re sick at the end of the night. All their wine is served in a complimentary paper bag. I think the reason the staff are so accepting and non-judgmental is because you could be a dribbling, borderline racist pub bore or the owner of Wetherspoons. Every day is an undercover boss day for them.

They are also discreet enough to know when you want to be left alone. Order your drinks over the phone, they don’t care, they don’t even need your name. They won’t patronise you with unwanted small talk. They’re happy for you just to be a table number. In a way, it’s a lot like prison, with no clocks and no natural daylight. You enter, and before you know it years of your life have gone, and you emerge blinking to a family who no longer recognise you. And the sex in the toilets is amazing.

I think the religious vibrations of the church buildings in which they are often housed, cling to the walls. You go into Wetherspoons and come out transformed. You are encouraged to let go, to give up - not on alcohol or cigarettes or gluten – but on life. This is a place to lose your inhibitions, your anxiety and on a good night, your house keys. Men go in stressed, anxious, cheating on their wives, they leave with no job, no wife, living with nature in a park. It's magical. The carpets are sticky with the alchemy of giving up!

I once went on a week-long maple syrup cayenne pepper juice cleanse. If it’s good enough for Beyoncé, I decided, it’s good enough for me. I lasted four hours. Then I snapped, got a kebab and ate it, dead-eyed watching RuPaul’s Drag Race in bed. I even used my duvet cover as a napkin. It was such a transcendental moment of pure euphoria, I wondered, am I allowed to do this? And I was! Should I do this? Different question. That’s what Wetherspoons is to me, that precise feeling. Just give up for a bit. It’s a brief reprieve from the airbrushed, photoshopped, FOMO, cult of productivity. No one takes selfies in Wetherspoons.

It’s for the people who yearn to have a lie down during a Zumba class, buy clothes that actually fit the weight they are now. People who just want to watch Friends on TV, because they like Friends. 

In Wetherspoons you can cancel meeting a friend you don’t actually like. It’s the WhatsApp group you start up to slag off other people in your WhatsApp group. Visiting a Wetherspoons is pressing snooze on your own potential.

So don’t claim to be a socialist in a hipster café that charges five pounds for a cup of coffee when you can be in a place with the masses, enjoying unlimited refills as long as you promise to not steal the mug.

If you really want to feel what it’s like to live in a socialist paradise, come to Wetherspoons, brimming with nationalist propaganda, cheerful proles happy to have survived another day, run by a deranged dictator who’d probably happily be responsible for the death of millions. 

Wetherspoons - Hasta la victoria siempre!

Things that have annoyed me this week: WEATHER FORECASTS

It’s a great comfort to me that one good thing has come out of Lockdown. In Covid times, with outdoor socialising the only option for many, we were more reliant than ever on the accuracy of weather forecasts and this closer scrutiny quickly exposed them as the sham they are.

“Shall I meet my friend tomorrow, oh no my app says it’s going to rain, I guess we’ll have to cancel”. Cut to the next day, the sun is breaking the rocks on the road and my app is proudly announcing sunshine all day. How very convenient.

They can get away with it, because they can just REFRESH their mistakes and we’ll put our confusion down to our bad memory. Soviet Russia could only dream at this level of crowd hypnosis, immediate airbrushing of every blunder.

How difficult can it be to be a weather forecaster? They dress it up as science, air flow, sea patterns, atmospheric pressure - oh really? To let us know that in April in the UK it’s probably going to rain and you still get it wrong 50% of the time?

Last week, the Met Office announced it’s going to partner with Microsoft to build the most powerful weather supercomputer in the world, twice as powerful as any other computer in the UK. I absolutely promise you, this trillion-pound piece of futuristic technology will announce a 50% chance of drizzle and still get it wrong. This is the Bill Gates conspiracy we should be worried about.

 I want to go undercover at weather school, I bet the more students progress the more they twig that no one really knows what the weather is going to be, it’s too mysterious and dangerous, like the moods of Mariah Carey, to ever be truly understood.

By then, of course, they’re in too deep, they owe thousands in university fees and if anyone is going to blow the lid on Big Weather it sure as hell isn’t going to be them. Meteorologist offices must be full of people pissing about on Twitter and then two minutes before the news starts, someone wanders over to the window and decides it looks like rain. Why are weather forecasters, of all news staff, always the ones happiest with themselves, brimming with ambiguous sexuality? Because they know they have the easiest job in the game.

Sure, every now and then there’s a slip-up. After Mike Fish (yes, I call him Mike, get over it) failed to predict a hurricane, I imagine he was swiftly driven to an Eyes Wide Shut ball and warned by other weather forecasters in masks that he was bringing a bit too much heat. Ulrika Johnson started asking too many questions and was demoted to hosting Gladiators. Did Piers Morgan really walk off GMTV, the biggest job in British broadcasting because he got ghosted by the actress from Suits, or was the gloating face of weatherman Alex Beresford, as he busked yet another weather forecast with a smug wink, just too much to take?

I checked my own weather app this morning and lads, it’s raining liars.