Montag Club

Germanophilia in Yorkshire

Mondays are a strange day for pubs. The post-weekend lull. Aside from a few who call in for a tea-time refreshment, to wash away the pains of the first day back at work, Monday evening is the preserve of your committed drinker.

Traditionally, it’s the quietest day of the week. Which is also why publicans use Monday as the day to achieve some sizeable weekly tasks behind the bar. Normally, shelves are stripped of their glasses and given a good scrubbing. Optics are cleaned, display bottles wiped down and refreshed, and glasses are polished.

And whilst this is happening behind our bar, we have the entertainment of Monday Club, or, as the Germanophile members of said club call it, ‘Montag Club’.

One of the most popular refrains from Montag Club is the belief that it is sacrilege that we close at 10pm on a Monday; a whole one hour earlier than most other days in the week, save Sunday. Historically, we used to be open until 11pm on a Monday, but, thanks to Covid, Mondays between 10 and 11pm are just not worth staying open.

Now I sort of understand their point, especially since they have been frequenting the pub for decades, and, as older men set in their ways, probably haven’t yet got used to the revised opening times, despite them being in place for nearly three years now. But when you’ve only got three customers in after 10pm, the costs of staffing, lighting, heating, water and other considerations, it really is unjustifiable to remain open.

Plus, and I say this as a seasoned and well-practiced drinker myself: if that extra hour’s opening on a Monday is essential to get your drinks quota in for the week, you probably need to have a little bit of a rethink on your drinking strategy…

So, here are some members of Montag Club.

Misnomer

Misnomer is Germanophile-in-chief. He could choose to visit exotic destinations like the Caribbean, or Greece, for his holidays, but instead will trip off every couple of months to Dresden, or Munich, or Hockenheim. He knows a few words of German, but uses them whenever he gets the chance. Hence his frequent ‘danke’ when his Stella is delivered, and the naming of Montag Club.

In fact, his Germanophilia even extended to our Sunday quizzes, where his team name was ‘Palmer Strasse’ (at least, that was the format. I’m not going to tell you his real street address. That would be cruel). I think that may have been his only contribution to the quiz though. So I suppose it’s only fair he gets to name the team and feel involved…

Misnomer also cycles to work. He used also to cycle straight to the pub from work, especially on a Monday. If I’m honest I’m not sure what made him stop cycling straight to the pub, but I haven’t seen him do it for quite some time. I’m certain a moral sense that cycling under the influence isn’t a good idea played a part.

I can’t imagine that his bicycle often moving without his input to various hiding places around our beer garden played a part in it at all though. And I can’t imagine who would do such a thing, either…

Another quirk Misnomer displays is his insistence that he has a gluten intolerance. Particularly on a quiz Sunday, he will only nibble at the crisps on the buffet, and only after he has confirmed on at least five separate occasions that they do not contain gluten.

Of course, he doesn’t drink the gluten-free lager we sell. Nor does he drink any of the ciders, bottled or draught, which are gluten-free. Nope. Misnomer chooses to drink, pretty much exclusively, pints of Stella Artois.

I’m sure you remember Stella’s famous advertising campaign, where they promoted the purity of their beer, as it contained only four ingredients: hops, malted barley, maize and water. The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice one of those is barley. Famous for containing a not-insignificant amount of gluten.

Whether Misnomer has a gluten intolerance, or a gluten hypochondria, is a matter for people better qualified than me. I can only call it as I see it…

Carling and lime, please

A domestic-combustion executive, Carling and lime, please (or maybe Calp, for short), only ever drinks the same thing. A large white wine.

I joke, of course. Calp freely admits he isn’t a connoisseur of good beers. In fact, when Heineken brought out their Silver, a ‘new, extra-refreshing and premium lager [with a] crisp flavour and subtle finish’, he described it has a wonderful beer and his new favourite.

Fortunately, we don’t sell it, so he is reduced to drinking Carling with a dash of lime. And, on the rare occasion when we have had an unexpected run on Carling and run out, he has been known to evacuate the pub quick-smart, despite having seven other lagers available on tap, each of which could be disguised with the addition of a luminous-green syrup…

Now it will come as no surprise that Calp isn’t alone in having one usual drink and never changing. But for most of our other predictable regulars, just a mutual look and a nod is sufficient to obtain their drink of choice. But for Calp, every visit to the bar, is met with the same refrain. Not even a ‘can I have my usual?’, or ‘same again, please’.

I’d go so far as to say that the phrase ‘Carling and lime, please’ will be the phrase Calp says most in his life. Except maybe ‘this is the log burner for you’…

Montag Club’s Telly Viewing

Now Misnomer and Calp like to watch sport on the television. It can be pretty much any sport. And it doesn’t even have to be live.

If live sport is on, they’d normally choose that. Like, for example, when the football match that was on had finished recently, they remembered that the England netball team were in the world cup final. So they asked to watch that. I assume out of unwavering patriotism, despite their Germanophilia. I can’t think of any other reason they’d want to watch those young, fit English and Australian ladies running around a court…

We’ve also had the pleasure, at their insistence, of American football, baseball, curling, hurling, Gaelic football, Aussie rules, ice hockey and, I’m fairly certain at one point, disc golf.

Often these televisual feasts are met with such questions from the assembled throng of ‘so why is that a foul?’, ‘what happens here then?’, and ‘ooof, did you see that? Watch it again here, he floors him!’.

However, a Monday evening is a special kind of experience, when it comes to sports viewing.

It started initially with Misnomer keen to watch the weekend’s football highlights from, you guessed it, the Bundesliga. For a period of time when the highlights moved from 7:30pm on Sky Sports to half past midnight, he took it as a personal affront. What on earth was he going to watch now?

That’s when he discovered that Monday nights often have repeats of other classic sporting events. In particular, classic boxing matches.

Misnomer and Calp enjoy a good slug-fest. Particularly one from the 20^th century, when ‘men were men’ and the boxing was ‘better’. In fact, such is the popularity amongst Montag Club for classic bouts, at one point they even threatened to rename themselves to ‘Boxing Club’.

And knowing the outcome, or at the very least the fact that a quick web search would reveal the result of the fight, doesn’t in any way seem to quell their investment in the previously-televised match now in progress.

I’m certain that I’ve heard them, on more than one occasion, bet on the outcome of the fight in progress…