Happy New Year from Advice Arnold / Pub Floors
Alright folks, the fun’s over. Turn off Now That’s What I Call Christmas, stop necking mulled wine by the gallon, head back to your day jobs and languish in the knowledge that it’s now the longest point of time until your next bank holiday.
But it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. The New Year can be a time for rejuvenation, for reinvention, for improvement, for self-betterment, for enhancement, for growth. Ok, so I got a thesaurus for Christmas and wanted to show off a bit. Give me a break. Or a layoff, or an intermission, or a rest, or some respite.
Maybe your New Year’s resolution is to quit coming to the decision on your own. If that’s the case, here are a list of potentiation resolutions that might just float your boat, your ship or your vessel.
- Stop clicking on clickbait articles like '24 Ugliest Celebrity Babies', '53 Ways Kim Kardashian Moved Her Eyebrows In December 2015', and '28,661 Prime Ministers Who Have More Sex Appeal Than David Cameron'. It’s become the prominent way we waste time in the 21st I clicked on one last Monday and it was Wednesday evening before I emerged.
- Losing weight is always a popular resolution. Now, I could tell you about some fad diet or a great workout routine, but instead I’m going to tell you this: take off the clothes your currently wearing, weigh them on your scales, inform social media that you’ve just lost said weight, eat a Twix.
- Maybe 2016 could be the year you finally give up smoking. A top tip - every time you start getting an urge to smoke a cigarette, just have a little toke on a crack pipe instead. It’s a fantastic way to suppress those cravings.
- A good way to immediately boost your popularity in the New Year is to crack the “My New Year’s resolution? Well, I’d guess I’d go for 1920x1080!” gag as many times as humanly possible. Literally cram it in to any conversation going.
- I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - January is always a good time to cut back on drinking melted lard.
Advice Arnold
coolbeansproductions.co.uk
Ahh, if these floors could talk you might want them to swallow you up. Here are surfaces worn thin under foot, worn thin from daily abuse, pockmarked with gum or ash burns, wood panelling that is sticky and peeling around the edges or carpets saturated with spilt drink and the stories of the drink spillers.
At their dampest and dirtiest, these floors suggest years of social history, maybe not all of it pleasant: a meeting of minds, a forging of friendships, angry or amorous moments that have gone too far, some break-ups, some make-ups and plenty of people talking complete bollocks. It's a moulding theatre of past productions, some of which never got past their first night. Those hyper-hygienic high street chain pubs may be clean and inviting, but their floor history is lacking, so shrines to some long-gone local industry plaster their walls to make up for it.
Once you start looking at pub floors, you start noticing that it's not unusual for pub carpets to be some kind of aggressive psychedelic vomit. These tessellating patterns, swirling feathers and spiralling leaves in bright colour are all the more arresting for having been previously ignored. 'This was beneath my feet all this time?' They are nuts. You’d never have them in this pattern at home. These were made with a pub in mind.
Is this carpet-aggro some kind of psychological trick to keep us corralled towards the bar? 'Well, I was going to go home, but a swirl in the floor caught the corner of my eye subconsciously and now I’m positively gasping for another pint of Farmer’s Blonde.' Another popular pub floor pattern is the black and white chessboard, where life is not a play anymore, but a game, and not necessarily a fun game either. The pub is many moves ahead of you and you’ve left your queen exposed.
So next time you are in the pub, try to take in the whole scene that is set before you, look at the floor beneath you and think of the stories it has seen and the stories it is helping to create.
Chris Delamere
@SheffPubFloors
