pub (Photo credit: Pretty/Ugly Design)

It’s been ten years this months since I moved into this apartment and eight years since pubs were allowed to open pretty much when they liked as long as the council let them.

I have mixed feelings about this, I enjoy a good night out as much as anyone else.  Ten years ago in this town we had pubs that shut at eleven and two clubs you could go to afterwards, I went to one of them every friday night, then across to the chippy for some food then wandered home.  Good times.

Now we have pubs open till two in the morning and no clubs, at all, just a dancefloor in the corner of a couple of pubs usually serviced by a mobile disco that is far too loud for the venue.  It just isn’t the same experience.

Then there’s the noise problem.  24-hour drinking was meant to stop people bingeing at ten to eleven, getting totally slaughtered and being anti-social on the way home.  It doesn’t seem to have reduced the fighting, or the shouting or the kicking down of walls it’s just moved it to two o’clock in the morning.  If I’ve been out myself it doesn’t bother me I’ll fall asleep anyway but when, like last friday, I need to be up early the next morning it’s a pain in the proverbial to not be able to sleep until gone two in the morning because of the noise of people screaming at each other outside the pub opposite followed by people walking home from town screaming at each other.  It’s even worse in summer because you have to keep the windows shut to reduce the racket and as such can’t sleep anyway.  It’s a lose-lose situation and you wake up next morning, ten minutes before you’ve got to get out the door and feel lousy.

Ten years ago I could leave my windows open in summer and be asleep before the loud-mouths returned from the clubs, or simply join them if I could afford to wake up at eleven the next morning but now it’s not so simple and with every passing summer I’m less convinced that the experiment has worked.