I dunno when it happened. When someone decided that it wasn't acceptable to swear in pubs. But it seems as though that's the way things are now.
I started drinking in pubs when I was 15. Now, I can't remember being hugely foul-mouthed at that age, but the older I got, the more I swore. And in my early twenties, all through to my thirties, right up until about the time I hit forty, I would swear in pubs. All of that cunting, bollocking, cunty, shithousing, wanky, fucking cunt-mouth twattery that you could ever imagine. And then sometime, I dunno, about four years ago, one landlord said, "Can you stop swearing?" Of course, I was pissed, so I slipped on my best shit-eating grin and said something like, "What the fuck?" The reply was, "I'm serious." And there was some allusion to there being other customers in the pub who didn't appreciate swearing.
Now, perhaps this disapproval of swearing in pubs coincided with the downturn in people using pubs, which coincided, probably, with the smoking ban and massively cheap beer available in supermarkets. And perhaps the landlords who disapproved of swearing were desperate to keep hold of their middle-class "drinkers" (in very inverted fucking commas, if you please) because they had more disposable income than us plebs. But let's honest. Let me spell this out in as simple a terms as you can understand. Back then, when the swearing ban began, it was swearers who kept the pubs alive. These guys who drank perhaps 10 pints a night, and whose language became more coarse the more pints you drew, they were the ones paying to keep pubs in business. And the middle-class, poncy twats who turned up once a week to have a Guinness surge and a vodka and tonic for their missus, together with a cheap meal on your menu, well, they were never going to be there every night of the week, were they?
But here's the thing. Like the smoking ban, the swearing ban has diminished the appeal of pubs for many people. People stopped going to pubs, because they could get cheaper booze at home and they could smoke in their own houses. And now more and more people like me are drinking at home, because they can swear in their own house. Me, I can drink cheap booze, I can slip into mockney and say, "Fackinell!" and nobody frowns at me because I'm "working class" or because I've used a word they don't approve of.
My local village pub decided they didn't want to have copies of the free magazine The Literary Commune available to its customers because it featured bad language. And when I was told this, I just thought to myself, "What the fuck? Why am I sitting in here spending, I dunno, twenty quid a night to drink alongside poncy, middle-class wankers who probably don't even fucking read anyway, when I can drink at home?" The local boozer is all very posh and la-de-da now, and I feel like a complete piece of cheap shit whenever I wander in there.
On the plus side for pubs, this tactic seems to have worked, because the local boozer is full of people who eat food and who drink barely fuck-all, whilst at the same time, not swearing. That's a nice earner for the boozer, admittedly. Posh people seem to have taken over pubs, and us riff-raff really aren't welcome. But it won't last. There will be another revolution. Perhaps next they will stop us from drinking alcohol completely in pubs?
But whereas the smoking ban was something enforced upon landlords by the government, the swearing ban was something which landlords themselves introduced. I even saw one pub in a town called Oakham where the owners had seen fit to place a sign to the effect that people who swore would be asked to leave.
I dunno. Pubs, beer, lairyness - it all lends itself to swearing. But the swearing ban? It's the death knell for me.
