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 on Sunday to anyone unless that person was a traveller. 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 and is refused admittance, while to his dismay, his friends lie and desert him. (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, sham 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.)