"There was the one you might get lucky in on Christmas Eve; the one you'd take a girl to, to impress her with the romantic views; and the one that only served cider in halves because it was so brain cell-poppingly strong a pub best tackled before a bank holiday Monday, known colloquially as Super Cider Sunday, when you still had a few brain cells to spare."
"When I arrived at university, the pub that became my second home was the Hand & Heart. Like Nottingham's other famous pub, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem (which claims to be the oldest pub in England), it's carved into the city's sandstone caves, a setting that means you get to feel like Batman sipping a brandy after a hard day's crime fighting. It was also our true local, just a quick stagger from the student house six of us shared which became both an incentive and a deterrent."
"But what we got really good at were the pub quiz machines. Rather than making polite chit-chat with our fellow student drinkers, the six of us would stand around the Monopoly machine like a trivia mafia syndicate. With our combined student knowledge covering nearly every base (Phil politics; Tony history; Becca French and Spanish; Saz French and management; me chemistry; the other Rich economics) and the fact that the questions kept repeating themselves, we could turn 50p stakes into profit."
Pubs functioned as personal markers for different social experiences, from chances of romance to exceptionally strong cider reserved for bank holiday weekends. The Hand & Heart became a student second home, its sandstone-cave setting lending a theatrical atmosphere and convenient proximity to a shared house. The group developed a habit of arriving at last orders to maximize drinking time. The six friends specialized in pub-quiz machines, pooling diverse knowledge across subjects and exploiting repeating questions to convert small stakes into winnings as a side activity.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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