shewhomust (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shewhomust) wrote2005-03-14 09:45 pm
shewhomust) wrote2005-03-14 09:45 pm
Impromptu picnics
Something that always strikes me about Laurie R. King's irresistible Mary Russell books - and it's either quite endearing, or as irritating as hell, and I'm not sure which - is that Russell is forever going into pubs for something to eat. So much of the period detail is right, not to mention the deft treatment of of the Sherlock Holmes material, yet the author clearly sees the British pub as it is now, and has no idea how recent a phenomenon it is.
The big mistake, of course, is not in the nature of the pubs described, but in the assumption that an unaccompanied woman would be welcomed in them at all. Russell wanders into pubs in London, in Oxford, in rural Devon, and never meets any kind of disapproval - indeed, in A Letter of Mary she uses the pub as an environment in which to make the acquaintance of a prospective employer. This in the teens or twenties of the twentieth century - you don't have to be a historian, you only have to be middle-aged, to know that the pub has not always been a woman-friendly place. Russell might have the nerve to do it, but any man who started chatting in a pub to an unaccompanied woman to whom he had not been introduced - well, I don't think he'd be offering her secretarial work.
And food is always available, in all pubs, quite often accompanied by coffee (the universal availability of coffee of any kind, let alone drinkable coffee, would be some kind of miracle even in twenty-first century Britain - but don't start me on the coffee!). How long have pubs been serving food on a regular basis? Twenty years?
I had the opportunity to reflect on these matters in some depth as we walked the length of Easington Colliery in search of lunch today: the symbol on the OS map that should have been a pub-with-food was a music venue, very closed, and although the town straggled on up the hill, past two large closed pubs and a couple of clubs, the pub that was open wasn't serving food. Eventually we bought a picnic at the Co-op, and ate it in the Memorial Gardens (quite fast - it was sunny but not warm).
After which we returned across the fields and down Hawthorn's Plantation (parallel to the Dene) to the coast, and our starting point. The Durham coast is not what it was, but that's a whole other story - the woods, however, were almost spring-like: at one point the snowdrops drifted right up the hillside, at another they were sprinkled in among the new leaves of wild garlic, so you could see that in a month or so a different kind of white flowers would be growing here.
The big mistake, of course, is not in the nature of the pubs described, but in the assumption that an unaccompanied woman would be welcomed in them at all. Russell wanders into pubs in London, in Oxford, in rural Devon, and never meets any kind of disapproval - indeed, in A Letter of Mary she uses the pub as an environment in which to make the acquaintance of a prospective employer. This in the teens or twenties of the twentieth century - you don't have to be a historian, you only have to be middle-aged, to know that the pub has not always been a woman-friendly place. Russell might have the nerve to do it, but any man who started chatting in a pub to an unaccompanied woman to whom he had not been introduced - well, I don't think he'd be offering her secretarial work.
And food is always available, in all pubs, quite often accompanied by coffee (the universal availability of coffee of any kind, let alone drinkable coffee, would be some kind of miracle even in twenty-first century Britain - but don't start me on the coffee!). How long have pubs been serving food on a regular basis? Twenty years?
I had the opportunity to reflect on these matters in some depth as we walked the length of Easington Colliery in search of lunch today: the symbol on the OS map that should have been a pub-with-food was a music venue, very closed, and although the town straggled on up the hill, past two large closed pubs and a couple of clubs, the pub that was open wasn't serving food. Eventually we bought a picnic at the Co-op, and ate it in the Memorial Gardens (quite fast - it was sunny but not warm).
After which we returned across the fields and down Hawthorn's Plantation (parallel to the Dene) to the coast, and our starting point. The Durham coast is not what it was, but that's a whole other story - the woods, however, were almost spring-like: at one point the snowdrops drifted right up the hillside, at another they were sprinkled in among the new leaves of wild garlic, so you could see that in a month or so a different kind of white flowers would be growing here.