Picture from Pubs Galore
On Friday Mandi and I took my dad out for a birthday meal, and today we did it again as it was my dad's actual birthday. My nana Freda took us as her treat and we went for Sunday lunch at The Willow Tree, a place we used to go to quite a bit but not so much nowadays. For quite a long time the pub was closed for the dreaded 'R' word - refurbishment. No good has ever come of a pub being refurbished so my heart sank when I found out that this place, which has a faultless reputation for food, had fallen victim to the curse of the refurb. It was awful to think that the real beer and unpretentious menu would soon be a thing of the past to be replaced by avocado and elder-flower flavoured craft ale and vegan cupcakes, and the clientele would be replaced with dicks in rolled up trousers, sleeve tattoos, top-knots and huge beards, and that's just the women, thank you and goodnight ladies and gentlemen, and now, Showaddywaddy!
We had been informed that an extension was being built among other things, and I walked past at one point a while ago and the place was gutted. It was an empty shell, I mean it was nothing more than a roof being held up by four walls. This was going to be our first visit since it reopened and I for one wondered what we were letting ourselves in for.
To my surprise and delight the difference was invisible, the pub looked to my none-interior designer eyes exactly the same. The extension hadn't been built and the pub looked just as it did before they knocked it to bits. Maybe they were accidentally working to a recent photograph or perhaps they were looking at spending a shit load of money before the end of the tax year so they didn't have to show a profit. This was a trick employed by the Working Men Clubs in the North-East in particular where fiddles were rife and they were determined not to show profit so the lounge bar would be redecorated by one of the members who took a payment in cash and wrote a receipt for six times the amount.
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