The Victoria Arms

Another of the pubs which briefly held a place in my heart during my teacher training days in Durham was The Victoria Arms - a characterful little haunt in an obscure location, almost completely overlooked by the student crowd. It was an exquisite Victorian relic: a small red-brick corner house, with mostly (I think... I fondly imagine) original, very old bar furnishings - dark wood, silvered mirrors, frosted glass partitions, and a mosaic-tiled floor.

However, I confess it was not solely these charming decorative features which won my affection, but also the fact the landlord had instituted a very generously priced 'happy hour' on Tuesday evenings. Moreover, it was one of the few bars in the city to be stocking 'Diamond White', a super-strength but rather tasty dry cider (I was born in Hereford, and spent the first few years of my working life in Taunton, the two great cider-producing centres of England: so, I have a weakness for cider).

[I wonder - do they still make 'Diamond White'? It was something of a cult phenomenon for a few years at the end of the '80s. Budget drinkers like myself would always look for hints from the winos as to which beverage delivered the most alcohol-per-penny; and for a while DW was definitely the favoured tipple of the hardened street drinker.]

The good thing about these unusually potent drinks (I have long had a fondness for Tennent's Super as well) is that they can actually get me drunk, get me high. The keys to surviving alcohol (which I am extraordinarily good at) are pacing and psychological preparation. My body can process around 4 'units' of alcohol per hour (most people can metabolise at least 2 - but I'm a big lad, and I've got a well-trained liver); if I don't drink much faster than that, I never get significantly drunk. Moreover, even if that pacing limit is slightly exceeded, I can still maintain my composure, my self-control, if I am aware that this is happening and can brace myself for it. But when you have a lager or a cider which just happens to be 2 or 3 times as alcoholic as most drinks of its ilk, it is very easy to forget just how strong it is - and to start drinking it (almost) as fast as you would a regular-strength drink.

And that's how merriment and foolishness begin.

My core drinking buddies at that time were my fellow Classicists on the teacher training course. That course had started a couple of weeks earlier than the undergraduate teaching term, so we were already tightly bonded by the time most of the University students showed up in town. The Classics Faculty, hearing that there were Classics graduates from Bristol, London, Oxford, in town, were kind enough to invite us to the welcome party for the undergraduate Freshmen. 'Kind enough' or 'rash enough'. The event happened to be on a Tuesday evening, so we had all spent an hour or so caning the cheap 'Diamond White' in The Vic beforehand. And it was a very dull party. Career academics are not generally the most thrilling of company, especially not Classicists (god, I'm glad I escaped that career path myself!). But there were some very attractive girls there (one, in particular - ah, what was her name??) - whom we decided needed saving.... from the dullness of the party, from the tedium of a Classics degree, from the threat of a dry & dusty career in academe.

So - we, er, kidnapped these delightful young ladies. Carried them off over our shoulders (unresisting, conspiratorial, I must add) to a more interesting bar.

I think I was probably inspired by The Schartz-Metterklume Method - a revolutionary technique for teaching history through re-enactment, promoted in a well-known short story by one of my very favourite humourists, Saki. Yes, the 'new governess's' review of Roman history was going so well.... until the children got to the rape of the "shabby women".