Hamish Champ: The 'pubcos', the beer tie and New Labour

There, that got your attention, didn't it?

It's funny how one only has to mention the Holy UnTrinity of the pub trade - the 'pubcos', the beer tie and Gordon bleedin' Brown - for some people to find themselves in the Land of High Dudgeon™ without so much as a return ticket.

Words such as 'smoking ban', 'upward-only rent reviews' and 'Didier Drogba' have a similarly debilitating effect on many individuals.

We live in a crazy, knee-jerk-reaction world after all. Take the pub sector. There's certainly a lot to get worked up about and to challenge there.

Yet there is no 'true and shining path'; only interpretations of a perceived truth. And it's easy to get sidetracked sometimes.

As with the licensed trade, so with life in general. One certainty in the Overall Scheme Of Things™ is that we will each have a cross or two to bear at one time or another.

As it goes, one's own croix de moment​ is a real doozy. But it doesn't do to dwell.

While it's easy to lose sight of the good stuff when all else appears to be just, well, brown and smelly, sometimes something happens which puts things into perspective.

Take this past weekend, for example. I'm in a band - the snappily-named Kings of Oblivion - and on Saturday night we played a gig at a pub in south east London.

In the audience - yes, there was ​an audience, thank you! - stood my nine year-old son.

He'd been really keen to see his old man play "a gig", and as we mugged our way through songs by obscure rock bands from the late 1960s and early 1970s there he was, grooving away.

Now I might have hit the occasional bum note on my (t)rusty bass, but as far as my lad was concerned I was "really good". Indeed as far as he was concerned I was, to coin a phrase, "the best thing ever​".

Of course he would say that wouldn't he? But I didn't care. Such praise, no matter that it was obviously biased, lifted my spirits no end.

Never mind Master Card; such is the stuff of the truly priceless.

And this coming on top of the boy saying he wanted me to take him to see Deep Purple later this year. Now that really did​ bring a tear to his old dad's eye...