David Smithers: Every pub has a Colin

It beggars belief how many Colins there are in the world, the bloke that suffers with the most extreme version of verbal diarrhoea and who knows exactly how to put your house(or pub) in order.

There are different breeds of pub customer, but in sub-categories there are many levels of Colins, from the nice one that will paint your pub for beer money, to the one who won't do a stroke of work, never buys anyone a drink, but comes in everyday with just enough money to keep himself in beer and tobacco. I knew one like this, his wife worked all day in the freezing cold on a council tip near Peckham whilst he sat in my cosy and warm pub, talking about the pubs "he used to have" and how he once threw Leonard Rossiter out on his ear!

More recently, there is a more despicable type of Colin, the one who resents publicans because they have a status he can't get, he longs to have the apparent importance of a pub landlord, but secretly knows he would not measure up to the job. You can cure this Colin, by simply allowing him to stand behind your bar for ten seconds, funny how different the world suddenly looks to him!

These Colins tend to be more expendable than the older type, as they rarely go into well-run pubs, and tend to frequent low-cost high street pubs, making their 99p pints last for 2 hours, whilst telling their pickled, unwitting audience about their latest "deal" on the stockmarket, when in reality Colin has only got a "Barclays sharesaver" account with 2 quids worth of Tesco shares. The worst weapons in this Colin's armoury are the second hand laptop and the blackberry he found on the bar of his wife's pub, with these items, he savages the forums of trade magazines where he fools himself into believing he has a hungry audience, eagerly awaiting his next pearl of wisdom.

Colin's cliches;

• "reduce your prices and you'll get people in!"
• "you should do more food, that's where the money is!"
• "have you thought about doing karaoke?"
• "Sky TV, that'll pack the place out!"

Yes, Colin has a Silver Bullet to cure all the ills of the licensed trade, thankfully, nobody will listen to him.