We’ve lost 20,000 pubs in the last 40 years. That sends a chill down my spine | Adrian Chiles

I don’t spend every night in my local. But even when I’m home, the knowledge that it exists makes life better

A closed pub is a sad, sad sight. Where once was life, people talking and laughing, now there is none. OK, bad stuff would have gone on too. I get that. Every pub has a drinker or two who needs the drink they’re holding more than they should. These places are, after all, potential vectors for dependence on a highly addictive substance, with all the misery that entails. But I think – hope – that pubs do more good than harm, that they’re more of a blessing than a curse.

Like most drinkers, I’m inclined to imagine that most of the population drink about the same as me, if not more, and in similar places. When the first lockdown was announced, including, unthinkably, the closing of pubs, Boris Johnson said he found it wrenching to be “taking away the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom to go to the pub”. I happened to watch him make that speech on a TV in my local pub – it was my birthday. I’m sure I nodded in agreement, though even then I thought it was a bit of a stretch to make the right to go to the pub sound like it was enshrined in Magna Carta. And when I checked, I found that only about half of adults regularly frequent pubs and bars. So not everyone, by a long shot, exercises their inalienable right, although that leaves no small number who do.

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist

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