The loneliness of the long-distance drinker

A Pub for All Seasons (Adrian Tierney-Jones, Headline £20). The Good Beer Guide 2025 (Camra Books £16.99)

By Phil Mellows

There are many kinds of pub guide. At one extreme you have little more than a list. At the other extreme you have Adrian Tierney-Jones, sitting there scribbling in his notebook with a pint in front of him, a mind wandering to those imaginary realms a pub can take you, far beyond the route from Pub A to Pub B.

In his new book, A Pub for All Seasons, the award-winning journalist and beer writer sets out to explore the changing moods of pubs from autumn through to summer. It’s really, though, a pretext for Tierney-Jones’ reflections on life and loss through the prism of a beer glass, a valuable insight into the way in which, for pub-going people, these moments over a beer are woven into the textures of our social being.

His subtitle’s promise of a “search for the perfect British local” is unfulfilled. Our guide is too distracted, too mercurial. But no matter. He had me at the first pub he mentions, the Lord Nelson in Southwold, where I had a pub epiphany of my own, on a National Union of Journalists beano to the East Anglian coast in 1976.

It was a blissful hour I’ve never forgotten, sat in the window to the left inside the door in the company a group of more interesting people than I, and my first pint of Adnams that remained, for some years, my favourite beer. It’s these kinds of moments that Tierney-Jones is chasing through the book, zig-zagging his way about the country, back and forth to his Devon locals (every serious pub-goer has more than one).

We share other favourites: the Salutation Inn at Ham, Gloucestershire, the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh, the Lion Tavern in Liverpool, the Peveril of the Peak in Manchester (pictured), the Seven Stars in Falmouth, the Albion Ale House in Conwy, the Artillery Arms in Ramsgate. I was eager to get to the next pub as I am eager to get to the next pub in real life, a failing perhaps, while Tierney-Jones is in no hurry.

This is slow travel, the time consumed by reflection. You can almost hear the leaden tick of a grandfather clock as he sips and muses and writes. The mood is frequently melancholic, “the loneliness of the long-distance drinker” as Tierney-Jones has it. He also invokes my favourite word, palimpsest, to describe how an old pub is somehow inscribed with the dead souls of the regulars who’ve spent so many hours there.

Occasionally, Tierney-Jones breaks his stream of consciousness to tune in to the frivolous chatter around the bar, noting that down too. And the mood brightens as summer approaches and he can get into the beer garden, but even there the deep memories that the pub stirs rise to the surface.

He’s fond of a simile, and the weakness sometimes gets the better of him. “Flower baskets swing in the breeze like incense burners on a holiday break” is exquisite, hinting at the religious tone that pervades the book. But the speeding cheetah that rudely irrupts into one melancholic moment will send the unwary reader sprawling like a rucked carpet that trips you when you’re trying to carry three pints back from the bar.

That’s the risk you take, reading Tierney-Jones. The more safety conscious will cling to the 2025 edition of the Campaign for Real Ale’s Good Beer Guide, with your comforting choice of Coronation Street’s Rovers Return or Emmerdale’s Woolpack on the cover.

These are the pubs we’d like our locals to be, the places where everyone comes together to act out life’s dramas without anyone getting hurt. We’ll never find the perfect pub, of course. That, too, is a fiction. But it’s fun trying, and the Good Beer Guide, as long as you like cask ale, is an effective tool to narrow down your drinking options when you’re visiting a strange town.

For me, it’s an essential companion, and the new edition reverts to its former format listing the counties alphabetically and all the breweries together at the back, which makes it easier to navigate.

Brief descriptions of each of the 4,500 pubs, written by Camra members on the ground who know it best, make it more than a simple list, though that does bulk it out and make it difficult to carry around. Handy tip: snap the relevant pages on your phone before heading out.

And if you should spot Adrian Tierney-Jones in a corner of some foreign pub, scribbling away, please do not disturb.