I don’t spend all that much time in pubs, so I’m not much help to them, but it seems important to know that they are out there and that I can go there for a beer when I want to.

It’s nothing to do with convenience or drink or food: it’s something to do with being English.

There used to be three pubs in my village. The Angel went a long time ago; The Swan went more than ten years ago, and then there was one. The White Horse is great. I was in there last week.

But it doesn’t survive because of me. It survives because the couple in charge are very good. They are big on food and accommodation: they get a lot of people staying for the sake of Minsmere, one of England’s great nature reserves.

I’ve lived a few hundred yards from that pub for ten years: this is the fourth couple running The White Horse, and the best. They’re in a hard business. And yet it’s not just a business, is it? A pub has a meaning beyond its balance sheet.

Village pubs aren’t what they used to be but they still matter. The days are gone when, if you wanted food, a country pub would offer you a choice between an aspirin and a pickled egg. Most pubs around Suffolk have a wine list; many have a menu with goujons and coulis drizzled over a warm salad. The tourist industry is pretty essential.

But a pub is still something that matters to those of us who actually live there, even if for many, the love of the local pub is platonic: a sincere emotion that requires no physical fulfilment. The existence of a living, thriving pub somehow validates the place you live in: ties us to the past, ties us to the place.

You can go elsewhere to get cheaper drink. You can’t smoke any more. You can get busted driving home. All kinds of social changes have taken place in the country and much of a pub’s function and nature has changed. But pubs still matter. Like post offices and village stores and people who actually live in the houses they own, they have a meaning. It is to be found in the ideas of continuity and community.

Pubs have a cultural importance. It’s not the real ales and the fine wines that matter: it’s the spirits, and pubs are part of the spirit of place. If they are anachronisms, they need to be preserved because of their cultural meaning. The French subsidise circus because they believe it has a meaning: we don’t do that in this country, and so we are losing circuses. We are also losing pubs: and that strikes me as a sad thing for us all. Still, there are plenty of McDonald’s.

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