The Traveller's Rest

One of the great 'lost' pubs. It enjoyed a brief flowering of 'perfect boozer'-dom, at a time when I was lucky enough to be able to enjoy it; but within a few years it had been utterly, tragically ruined by a change of landlord and ownership, and woefully misguided 'renovation'.

The Traveller's is near the top of a steep, hilly road leading out of Durham (all roads in Durham are steep and hilly), picturesquely called the Claypath. It happened to be fairly near the teacher-training school I attended at the back end of the '80s, and so - at my prompting - it soon became established as the watering-hole of choice for a large clique of my fellow student teachers. It was ideally dark and gloomy within, immediately cosseting you in a womby oblivion of the world outside. It had some very fine beer, and an excellent range of whiskies on the optic. It had a magnificent long bar of thick, ancient wood. It had an eccentric gaggle of hard-drinking regulars (mostly refugees from dull Civil Service jobs - I think there was a pensions office or somesuch just down the road). Best of all, it had an extremely friendly, extremely hard-working, extremely shrewd young landlord - a guy who, within just a few weeks of my meeting him, unhesitatingly subbed me some money so that I could carry on drinking there (after I had suffered one of those embarrassing lost bank card moments). And, almost better even than that, he had a dreamily lovely girlfriend (drop-dead gorgeous and a wiz in the kitchen - how often does that happen?) who served up some conspicuously better-than-average pub grub (her steak & ale pie, made with the excellent Theakston's Old Peculier, was a special favourite; it may well have been made with the otherwise unsellable dregs of the barrel, and was known on a few occasions to provoke a slight loosening of the bowels, but it was worth it!).

And yet this idyll was soon to pass. Just a few years later, I was back in Durham attending an interview for a teaching job at a local school. Naturally, I looked in on the Traveller's for a little nostalgia fix (I knew John and his fair lady had moved back to his native Stockport to open up a new place, but I thought there would still be some of the old magic left there)..... and found the place gutted, unrecognisable. Many fine British pubs have been ruined by pig-headed modernisations and refurbishments in the past 10 or 15 years, but this was the most pointless, most ham-fisted example I have ever encountered. It seemed impossible that the restful haven I remembered could so suddenly have been transformed into something so noisy and garish and charmless. The wonderful wooden bar was gone, removed (or, incomprehensibly, covered over with steel sheet). Everywhere there seemed to be chrome fittings and harsh lighting and twinkly neon displays - it was like being inside a pinball machine. And there were NO customers. I couldn't even bear to stay for one drink; I turned on my heel, and went outside for a quiet weep.

My thoughts turned to the Traveller's again in these past few days because it was the scene of my finest ever (almost certainly never to be exceeded) birthday celebration. It was only a few weeks into the teacher-training course, but that's such an extreme environment that it does foster a kind of 'battlefront camaraderie' - intense, if ultimately short-lived, friendships form very quickly. My new buddies and I had already firmly established the Traveller's as 'our local' (though usually for lunchtime rather than evening drinking; I was renting a small house in an old mining village some miles out of town, and - there being no late buses at that time - I generally headed home relatively early of an evening). So, the stage was ideally set for a BIG piss-up. So big, in fact, that I have almost no direct recollection of it (but that's how it should be!): all I know is that I woke the next day crashed out on the floor of a friend's room in the college attached to the teacher-training school, and needed a supporting shoulder to lean on to help me stagger, still barely conscious, the few hundred yards to our 9am lecture. The rest I had to piece together over the next several days from other people's fragmentary, sometimes accusatory accounts.

The key piece of evidence in reconstructing events came from Aileen, one of the regulars at the Traveller's, a semi-crazed Irishwoman who regarded the bottle of Old Bushmills on the optic rack as her personal property: she was peeved at me that I had singlehandedly emptied a bottle that was, she believed, more than half-full the last time she ordered a drink from it. This was a particularly terrifying revelation because I recalled that I had a declared policy for the evening that I would only buy myself whiskey chasers, expecting other people to buy me my pints as birthday offerings. 15 whiskies, 15 pints? Did I really do that?! I think perhaps I did! Ah, youth.... I wouldn't be able to any more.