Friday 11 October 2024

People (or rather, door) Watching

 I'm on the wind down to a proper holiday but, because of various things bubbling around at the moment, there are a few things I really need to get sorted before I go because it'll be really hard for anyone else to pick them up effectively.

So, by knocking-off time yesterday, I wanted beer and I really wanted "fucking hipster" (ie Keg, hazy, hoppy) beer.

Although it's not the BBBs favourite venue, he was happy enough to go to the Left Handed Giant brew-pub.

We knew it would be busy, and we were a little later striking out than was ideal, so we were braced for the idea that there would be nowhere to sit.

As it was, we were pleasantly surprised to see that there were quite a few perfectly good spaces to sit.

He went and grabbed a spot, and I fetched the beer.

Though it was noisy, I found the hubbub quite relaxing.  What was less so, was the icy draught that swept through the building everytime the door was left open.

We ended up watching to see how people behaved when going through the door.

- parties with more than 2 people tended to hold the door open for the person behind, and each subsequent person pushed the door a little more open until the point that it stopped trying to close.  Most of the time, the door was then left open.

- If there were many people both coming in and coming out this was more likely to happen.

- Every now and again someone close to the offending door would get up, and close the door and sit down again - only to have to do it all over again.

- Just one or two people noticed that the door had locked up when they had come in - and then made an effort to close it.  I wanted to award those folk gold stars.

This is our form of people-watching.  We have "views" on the proper way to be in a pub.

We weren't completely condemnatory about behaviour, though.  As people with our own quirks we could completely understand that some people aren't as relaxed as us about going into a drinking establishment - maybe that you hadn't been to before, or in order to meet someone - it would be easy not to notice the door when you're a little anxious about making your entrance and looking for a friendly face.

It was, though, a distracting evening - and that's what I really wanted.

Today I'm tieing up more loose ends before we travel tomorrow...

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