Dale Harvey, from Nottingham, is a man after my own heart. He likes pubs. A former pub landlord, he says: “Pubs are more than places to drink alcohol, they are the heartbeat of the community. If we lose the British pub, it would be catastrophic.” I’d probably find a milder word than catastrophic, but other than that this is exactly the kind of thing I often say.
Harvey loves pubs so much he’s committing to visiting every single pub in the UK. He says he’s doing this to “put money in tills” and encourage people to go to pubs they might not have visited before. I salute his efforts, but I have a couple of issues. First, unless he and his partner, Holly Booth, are quite monumental drinkers, what they put in the tills isn’t going to save the country’s pubs. Second, while I don’t for a moment doubt their sincerity about raising awareness of the industry’s issues, I strongly suspect that their main reason for doing it is that it’s a big adventure and lots of fun. And that’s fine. For my money, that’s reason enough. They don’t need to cloak it in some greater purpose. Same with rowing the Atlantic, riding a pedalo up the Amazon or swimming every canal in Birmingham: if you want to do something mad, feel free to just go and do it. If you want to give it A Purpose, no problem. If you’re giving it A Purpose only to raise the money to do it in the first place, that may be another matter. But if it just sounds fun, please, off you go. There’s no shame in having fun.
I’ve got news for Dale and Holly, though. Having visited just over 5,000 pubs so far, they have about 34,000 to go. At a rate of, say, 20 pubs a week, it’s going to take them more than 32 years. Best of British. I wish them well.
For my part, I harbour an ambition to drink a pint of stout in each of the 32 counties on the island of Ireland. This will take either eight, 16 or 32 days, depending on whether I can manage four, two or one pints/counties a day. While I’m ironing out the details, please be assured that I’ll be doing it without any higher purpose. It’ll be just for fun. Fun is fine.
• Adrian Chiles is a writer, broadcaster and Guardian columnist
