Skip to main content

The Cross Rifles

Pub review

They say:
"I have been going to The Cross Rifle's with 3 or 4 friends for about 15 years. We usually go on a Friday evening about once every 4 weeks or so. It is usually quite loud and sometimes it's hard to make conversation. We always have a good night's drinking, and the Carling extra cold particularly good, Although I do wish they would sell Pernod! The clientele are mostly regulars, the most outstanding being a group of very friendly Lesbians, who are often up for a laugh. All in all a great bunch of people and the Bar Staff are great as well. The Reason I only give it 4 stars is Because they Don't Sell Pernod."--Philip Salt
4/5

I say:
I must look like a card-carrying member of the metropolitan elite. The bar staff quietly fret that I might not be able to cover my order with cold, hard cash. There's relief when I produce a tenner and my communist queen-hating credentials are in tatters. They comment that I must have been here before as if being a cash-only pub in Bridgwater is some kind of novelty. Located at the promontory of a residential peninsular the Cross Rifles sits between the Bristol road and the Bath road. The early evening traffic flows from the roundabout into incessant bisected streams. Rather busier than inside where I take the total clientele up to 5. The bar and the walls have a curious combination of timber frame infilled with brick in a regular overlapping pattern. It doesn't seem like it would be easy to fabricate and I'm not sure the visual impact warrants the effort. What I assume must be the landlord stands at the end of this faux-bar steadily drinking the profits. If he's not the landlord then someone really ought to step in. A few more people come in, they join the existing group and raise the conversation level enough (volume not quality) to make the place seem busy. A father and son stop by for beer, milk and a game of pool. A man stands alone at the opposite end of the bar to the bibulous 'landlord'. He seems to be the only one piqued by my presence. He looks at me like the ghost of consultancy future. Drifting through a foreign place forgotten by a distant employer, free of bureaucracy and fettered by grinding life. Like Kurtz up the river, are his methods unsound? I take a sip of my pint, glance up again and find, for no dramatic effect, he is gone.
2/5

Comments

Popular posts

The Duke

Pub review They say: "We came for a skittle on a Saturday night and they were very welcoming but you know how you hear about lizards ruling the world, the barstaff had a very lizardy look. Make your own mind up!" --Craig Savage 4/5 I say: 'The place where everybody knows your name' The claim is painted onto the wall and doesn't seem so outlandish on this chilly Tuesday night as there is no-one in the pub to know my name or not. Dry January? I can't imagine that's a thing around these parts. You don't keep over 30 pubs in business with virtuous gestures like that. It might be a Tuesday thing. Per usual I try to find a quiet corner with my beer, surely an easy task in an empty pub? Not so. Speakers hang from every nook and carpet the space in a thick fog of sound. It isn't even the usual autotuned pop/R&B dirge being vomited into my ears. That stuff I can confine to a background hum. Instead it's the pre-match commentary for the Brighto

Sisyphean Airlines

Day 56 - Panama City We nearly didn't make it into this slip of a country. Cruel fortune had us standing in the queue for the only Panamanian border officer who had read and decided to adhere to the rules. "Return ticket?" bugger.  His steely, uncompassionate gaze was unmoved by our desperate explanations of our travel 'plans'. Bribery also failed to move him to endorse our entry so our bus driver, with infinite generosity, offered to relieve us of another $36 to write up a return ticket to San José that we would never use. This finally satisfied the entry requirements and the stamp thumped down. The country is divided by a synonymous strip of water down which floats a not insignificant quantity of the world's goods. Though our initial plan was to dive the canal, renovations kiboshed that idea and we had to settle for the traditional topside view.  On initial viewing the city itself seems built on the wealth its transoceanic connection brings.  Buildings soa

Angkor Whaaaaat?

Day 5 - Siem Reap With the water festival finished we has one more place to visit in Cambodia. Angkor Wat is an indisputable wonder of the world and the largest religious monument ever constructed. It sits within a temple complex covering 400km², the scale of which is impossible to adequately describe. Its towers seem to rise organically from the ground, the stone flowering from the earth into wonderfully symmetric form. Only modern capitalism and totalitarian hubris seem to inspire similar architectural endeavour as the gods did in the past. I don't necessarily agree with any of those ideologies and their human cost but religion's diminished power permits me a less coloured appreciation of its monuments. In the stone of Angkor Wat you see reflected the same desire for, and defiant belief in, permanence that runs through our species. I see it in the chiselled signage above the entrance to long dead banks and businesses in the City of London. The owners thought the gilded lobb