Where everybody knows your name
On TV and in the stories, every pub is a community gathering place, and every bartender doubles as a personal counsellor. It's an enticing notion. It's also, as near as I can tell from personal experience, false. The only socializing I've seen at pubs is within the groups that arrived together, and the friendliest a bartender or waiter/waitress gets is when they're aiming for a good tip. It's kind of disappointing, but it's not really all that surprising. Everyone's just doing their jobs, and society has gotten to the point where you never know whether you can trust your neighbour. It's possible I've just been looking at the wrong places; it's also possible that I'd have to frequent the same place on a nightly basis in order to get to know the people who work there and the other "regulars". It would be an interesting experiment if I could find the time to investigate it.