15p a pint . . . I’ll drink to that

ALL this talk of pubs shutting down has had me thinking back to the days when I first began to enjoy a pint. And can you guess how much my first pint cost?

It was an incredible 15p, which means I could have bought 14 for what a pint of Robinson’s bitter now costs me in the New Inn in Dukinfield.

Blimey, when I first started going out for a drink I don’t think I would have had £2 in my pocket. It was more likely to be 75p.

I realise I am harking back almost 40 years, but it is quite remarkable how the price has kept on going up and up.

Around the time I was 18, I went with some friends to the hottest venue in Ashton — the Palais de Danse which was then called the Birdcage and was soon to become Tiffany’s.

We sauntered into the upstairs bar and were horrified to see that a pint cost a whole 25p. There was no way we were going to pay that much so we spent the evening on another fruitless search for girls and had to content ourselves with watching them dance to “Ghost in my House” by R Dean Taylor.

When ale was about 45p a pint, I remember my friend’s dad and grand-dad insisting they would go tee-total rather than pay 10 bob. Well, we know what happened to that promise.

Looking back, I used to indulge in some absolute sewage when I was first drawn to the demon drink. Can you remember such classics as Whitbread Gauntlet, Red Barrel, Toby Light or Younger’s Tartan?

But one pint I do miss is Chester’s mild, which was brewed in Salford. It was very dark and only seemed to be sold in back-street battle-cruisers (Dukinfield rhyming slang for boozers).

Then Whitbread’s realised they’d got it, started pushing it, and the quality went right off. I don’t think it exists any more.

Thinking on, there are lots of drinks that are no longer available — or at least I think they aren’t. Does Jubilee Stout still exist, or Mackeson? And what happened to those women’s drinks like Cherry B, Snowball or Pony? Then of course there was Blob in Yates’s wine lodges. I could go on.

And are juke boxes still around because I can’t remember the last time I saw one?

I used to love using them, or playing the machines. I was so bad that my mate’s dad used to say he was going to put a slot in his chimney breast because I would happily put all my change down it.