In case you’ve been stuck down a cellar or under a wedge of HMRC reminders and missed it, the Diary of a CEO podcaster-entrepreneur recently announced (with dramatic horror) that three glasses of wine “ruined his life” for three days.
Join our new WhatsApp channel: The Morning Round-Up
Get the biggest pub trade stories straight to your phone. Listen to our one-minute daily news briefing and receive breaking news, exclusives and sector updates throughout the day. Remember to turn notifications on in the top right corner!
Join the channel here.
He podcasted this, as he does, to his millions of followers without so much as a second of embarrassment that it ruined his sleep and ability to pump up his biceps as effectively as normal.
Two crises
He’s big on the idea of ‘optimising’ his life, which seems to mean fun is pretty much off his agenda. But it’s more sinister than that because our country is currently in the grip of a loneliness epidemic AND a catastrophic hospitality crisis.
Loneliness is often felt by a staggering third of 16 to 29-year-olds and they’ve even been called ‘generation lonely’. It’s the highest suffering of all age groups too, according to the Office for National Statistics. Bartlett’s so-called ‘optimised’ life sees spontaneity go and we all know some of the best times in life have been when you’ve gone out for that ‘one drink’… because we all know what fun that can lead to!
At the Killingworth Castle, in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds, we’re a Michelin-recommended pub with 3 AA Rosettes but we recently made the decision to put a snooker table and dartboard back into one of our rooms.
Our teenage son started meeting friends in the pub and they only go where there is a pool table. The response has been amazing, especially among young people. As a staunch supporter of joy, or at the very least provider of the backdrop and tools with which to embrace joy, I don’t know why we didn’t do it sooner.
No judgement
Bartlett’s narrative around micro-managing every minute in life is an increasingly dangerous threat to our trade and next generation of young pubgoers.
Pubs can be part of that solution because we’re one of the few places that can still offer a space to relax with no judgement for taking time out. Young people already spending too much time indoors post-Covid and subject to a disappearing job market shouldn’t be made to feel worse by not ‘optimising’ their life, whatever that means. We should be encouraging everyone in these challenging times, especially our young people, to socialise more, not less. While we may be more in tune with health and wellness, I fear the cost of isolation is too big a cost to bear.
I’d always rather hear about diaries from a Friday night than those from an out-of-touch CEO. I’ve always said pubs are the original social media but how long is it going to take the next generation to realise how good the pub is? Roll on this return to analogue, it can’t come quick enough…
