Get your kids out of my alehouse - NOW

That'll be £19 please

Some dingbat tweeted this today: "Hither Green people: DECENT LOCAL PUB ALERT!! The Lord Northbrook near Lee station. Completely refurbished & familyfriendly. It's lovely!" 
I feel compelled to respond.
Take your children, your buggies, your piles of fucking toys, your colouring in books ('oh Josh and Hetty are so creative!' 'Yes, so's my Jacasta. Don't pull Max's hair, darling') and sod off.
It's a pub - it's for grown ups. I don't bring a bag of cans down the nursery. Hardly ever. Because it doesn't fit. No one wants to hear your precious little angels until they have developed something approaching an indoor voice. Kids have two settings - loud and off. They are unsuitable for public consumption.
No one cares if they can walk or talk or play the recorder or ride a bike or do joined up writing. We can do all that for ourselves. 

You sit there all smug with your JCB prams, taking up the corner - yes, you always wodge yourselves in the corner - with your ghastly 'work in progress'.

All the lads have long fucking hair - you think it's you allowing them 'personality' but singularly fail to grasp that you're schooling them in conformity. These uniformed little toy soldiers are racing up the same track as their vapid parents. 

You with your Sunday papers and your friends all sitting there, dead from the neck up, desperately looking round the table for something, anything to tell you this is all worth it, and wondering which one of them you could fuck.

Sandals and shorts in the summer, Gola fucking trainers and scarves in the autumn - coalition-tolerating, dribbling halfwits. 'Family friendly' pubs are an abomination - they should be WIPED OUT! You gave up fun for kids, why poison the rest of us?
You've had it your own way for long enough and it's about time we pushed back. Next time you see this shower, plonk yourself down in the middle of them and swear and fart as if your very sanity depends on it. Because it just might.

Had to include this emailed response from a chum: 'A local cafe near me has felt the wrath of the mumsnet crew as well. The cafe put up a sign saying that the regulars were being driven out by screaming kids running about the place. All they said was ‘you can come in but you need to ensure that your kids are kept under control for the sake of other customers’. From the reaction of the parents you’d have thought the place had arranged a sex offenders coffee morning. Bellends.'

 

Letter to Zero Degrees in Blackheath - re pizza droopage

This isn't the pizza in question

I was in your place on Saturday with my girlfriend and we both had pizzas. Mine was the Italian sausage one and hers was parma ham. They were both very tasty but the bases were simply too thin to function. This is, I feel, a fundamental problem with the pizzas. The middle bit - radius of about three inches - was just mush. Any attempt to pick up a full slice was sheer folly as this middle bit just collapsed, dragging the cargo of the whole slice with it. So I had to eat the middle bit with cutlery - my face burned with shame - before eating the outer half slice by hand. 

I mentioned this to a waitress as we were leaving and she said they're supposed to be eaten with a knife and fork. I batted this aside, insisting that pizza should be eaten by hand - at the very least it should be an option.
Thin bases are the only way to go but the problem with the ones we had - and it's happened every time I've been in - is the base is just too thin to pass the fold test. This is where you pick a slice up, fold it in at the edges and the rest of the slice stays erect. There may be a couple of centimetres droopage at the end but that's acceptable.
The pizza was among the tastiest I have ever had but, because of the base, it was rendered merely adequate - a 9/10 effort becomes a 6/10 disappointment.
That said, the pilsner is ace.

More pizza guff

And here