I have been saddened to discover that one of my favoured drinking haunts in my last year or two as an undergraduate at Oxford - the Marlborough House, off the Abingdon Road - is shuttered and up for sale. At least it appears to be a fairly recent closure, and perhaps it will re-open when it finds a purchaser.
Pub closures (or - even worse - makeovers, transformations into glib and soulless wine bar/bistro/gastro-pub monstrosities) have been proceeding apace across the UK for at least the past decade-and-a-half, I guess, but this sorry process really seems to have gathered added momentum with the recent economic crisis. So many of the neighbourhood corner pubs in Oxford seem to have disappeared since my last visit. The demise of each one of them desecrates another cherished memory, obliterates an emblem of past happiness, removes yet another tie to the carefree days of my far-off youth, to my former life in England.
It makes me very sad. Not only sad, but even more acutely aware of my vagabond status in the world, my disconnectedness, my solitariness.
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