LAST YEAR, three local gay venues shut-up shop. I loved them all. The first could be seen as misfortune. By the third, it was beginning to look like carelessness. A wider endemic spread first across the capitol, then the country. 50% of UK nightclubs have closed in the last two years, pubs following similarly escalated finales. This is no longer a gay thing. Suddenly, a new and very 21st century, postdigital fear sets in. What will Britain look like without its local pubs?
As a starting point for this brave new world, I suppose we have to take into account that the primary shared space for socialising is now online. It’s happened harder, faster and with more brutish efficiency than I’d expected. There is some rational explanation. If you want to do many of the things you once did in a pub other than drink – have a natter, fill a jukebox, play a little game, see what people are wearing, cop off, smoke, get angry, loud, funny, shy or bitter – you can do that 24 hours a day. That’s where tribal delineations are made; where interesting people with complimentary views form little sub-committees of opinion and taste; where you can gauge who is wrong and right about Jeremy Corbyn or Justin Bieber; where the nature of friendship itself has changed irrevocably, no longer necessarily about human interaction but free-floating pictures and words.