respess@ut-ngp.UUCP (05/16/84)
[Have this nice Budweiser, bug; Mother'll just have that old Guinness.] Prior to WW1, Britain had a law that public houses could not serve alcohol before six on Sunday to anyone except those travelling. To qualify as a traveller though, one merely had to convince the publican that he had come more than 3 miles from home. There is a description of the workings of this law in "The Diary of a Nobody", by George and Weedon Grossmith. Read this wonderfully unselfconscious "diary" of a Victorian nerd (first pub- lished in the nineties as a serial in "Punch") to find out how Charles Pooter tells the truth about where he lives and is refused admittance to The Cow and Hedge, while to his dismay, his friends lie and desert him for the pleasures of the bottle. (Actually, this is as much a plug for the book as it is a description of liquor law oddities. It's absolutely de- lightful to see this little man constantly at odds with his little world which is infested by insolent tradesmen, friends who are only mar- ginally so, a waster of a son and his shady companions, bogus honors, in- subordinate subordinates, slights (some imagined and some very real), and a host of inanimate objects that a malevolent Nature has strewn about like banana peels to upend him.)