Mark Daniels: Fighting a losing battle

You know the type I mean: you wake up to bright sunshine streaming through the window, the children have risen and quietly made themselves comfortable in the lounge, watching TV rather than coming through and disturbing you, and as you lie there your wife roles in for a cuddle, kisses you seductively and then gives you that inviting smile.

Then you get out of bed, stand on the glass of water you'd taken through with you the evening before, which shatters under foot and cuts you. By the time you've hopped through to the bathroom, gritting your teeth in agony, heavy rain is lashing against the window and the children are beating each other senseless for the Sky remote, arguing over Spongebob Squarepants or Ben 10.

And it gets worse from there. Or, at least, it did for me.

At the end of her lunchtime shift, one of my regular members of staff gave a week's notice, creating several staffing issues, and my wife decided to de-stress herself by eating the living room carpet.

Later, as customers complained about the hygiene of a particular individual, I discovered it's actually harder to have to send somebody home because they need a shower than it is to bar them for being drunk and unruly.

It all left me in need of a drink and, if I'd been a smoker, a cigarette would surely have been in order too. As it was, Saturday evening was reasonably quiet so I decided to partake of a pint and join some of my friends out in the shelter, even though I don't smoke. As I stood there, chatting and enjoying the ambience despite the cool May temperatures, I noticed two youngsters - one a daughter of a chap I was chatting with - sitting in the beer garden. It wasn't too late for kids to be on the premises, but that wasn't what caught my attention.

What was bothering me was the fact that, in one hand, this thirteen year old girl had a cigarette. In the other, she had a can of lager.

I am quite diligent on underage drinking, and none of my staff would dare sidestep my rules on asking for ID if somebody appears to be too young, and I'm fortunate that we don't have a particular problem with youngsters trying to purchase alcohol in the pub. So I knew that this girl hadn't got the product from me.

The other give away was the fact that I don't sell cans of lager. And, although the brand she was drinking is one of Britain's best-selling premium lagers with a nickname associated with marital disharmony, I don't even have that product on draught, either.

My emotions were torn. Should I be bothered by the fact that there was an underage drinker on the premises, or the fact that what she was drinking hadn't even be purchased from me?

I wandered over and quietly told the girl to leave the premises, then walked back to her dad. He smiled at me as I raised the issue with him: "what can I do?" He said. "She's streetwise, she knows what she's doing. If she wants to smoke and drink, who am I to stop her?"

And people think it's the pubs who are encouraging underage drinking...