My perfect pub

Inspired by an article pinned to the wall in the classic Bell at Aldworth, which in turn was inspired by George Orwell's famous essay 'The Moon Under Water', here's my idea of a perfect pub

• The pub is located in a beautiful location in good walking country, maybe an isolated pub on the marshes, or close to the sea in smuggling country, or nestled in the heart of a moorland village.
• The building is instantly recognisable as a pub: a solid lump of a building in the local style, demonstrably a pub for at least a century.  It will have a free-standing, simple pub-sign or the name of the pub painted on the exterior
• The interior will be multi-roomed with differing rooms linked by a central lobby or passageway.  The passage or lobby will be spartan with a quarry tile or slate floor and room for some stand up drinking.  The rooms will have a different character with a plain public bar and a cosier snug or saloon.  All rooms will be a symphony of brown wood and tobacco stained, ochre walls.  Farrow & Ball can do one.
• The servery will be unusual and the heart of the pub.  Maybe no bar at all with service direct from the door of the cellar or via a hatch.  If there is a bar it will almost be a room to itself forming the hub of pub with openings to the different rooms.
• Furniture will be mismatched classic pub furniture: settles, bench seating, scrubbed deal table, windsor chairs etc.  Certainly no dining furniture and god forbid any 'reserved' signs (unless a table set aside for locals).  The walls will be covered with items of local interest: old photos of the pubs and it's locals
• Real ale, of course, will be served: a smallish range of locally produced beers, ideally served straight from a barrel on a stillage.  The beers will change through the seasons with a dark beer in the Winter and light, hoppy beers in the Summer.  Extra points for a legendary local strong ale for when you are not driving.  The real ale will be further dispensed in outside toilets.
• Food will be served but will be for sustenance, the pub is not a restaurant.  Allowable food includes filled rolls (or cobs if you prefer), pork pies, pasties, a ploughman's and home made soup,  If a pub needs to sell food to survive then a menu of simple, well made, pub classics will suffice.
• There will be no TV, fruit machine or pool table.  Pub games will be played: darts, bar billiards, shove ha'penny, 'ring the bull', 'toad in the hole' and quoits.  Extra points for any local games: Bat & trap in Kent, Aunt Sally in Oxfordshire and triple points for games with inexplicable rules known only to a few locals.
• The pub changes through the seasons: In the Summer the pub's garden comes into it's own: it's a simple grassed area with a few picnic benches or a few benches in front of the pub. In Winter a log fire in an inglenook fireplace or coal fire warms the rooms.
• Finally, people make the perfect pub.  You'll be made to feel welcome by staff and locals and interact with them.  They're pleased that you've visited their perfect pub and don't give the impression that they're doing you a favour.  It's the warm welcome and all the other aspects that means you'll leave the pub with a smile on your face and 'that was fucking magic' on your lips.

The perfect pub, of course, doesn't exist but I've been to many that come close.  I'll look at a number of these in future blogs