Yates Wine Lodge...

I discovered an old post of mine on another blog. Upon re-reading, as with so many of these things, it was actually quite good in distant retrospect. It concerns the closure of Yates Wine Lodge in my old home town of Margate, and I penned a post for that ill-fated blog experiment at the time, which I reproduce here for my audience of no-one in particular...

Yates's Wine Lodge Closes


Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.



An Epitaph to an Armpit

There were really no redeeming features to Yates's Wine Lodge in Cecil Square.
An ugly building jutting out like a beery hooker, plying it's wares without shame to the passer-by. Devoid of character, this was a glass and wood teat, suckling a willing, bovine crowd with Cherry Vebas and cider. Spending an evening in there was a cross between a school disco for angry children and being contained in a trapezoid mandala designed to eat your soul. All the same, it was assuredly Margate and assuredly Thanet. Which is probably why it closed.

In other towns and cities, the Yates brand had retained an air of faux-exclusivity, regarded as somewhere to congregate before the drinking started in earnest. A genteel Wetherspoons. You'd rarely find the same old faces propping up the bar, sallow-eyed and oozing surrender. You'd find a smorgasbord of "types", mingling uneasily by the fruit machine. Something about Yates's always seemed aloof, the brass and the shininess, the strictly MOR musical selection and the stout refusal to concede to a karaoke night, football on the telly or a dart board. When it opened, it seemed other-worldy, a place with sofas and natural light, that sold food to the hungry. You were always hungry, as it usually took 2 hours to arrive, which must be considered a cunning marketing ploy.

Of course, the residents of Thanet customised the Yates experience, emptying the shelves of alcopops and acting with bewilderment at the "no hats" rule. I myself was relieved of a felt fedora, previously liberated from a bearded chap at the Britannia public house.
Despite this dearth of virtues, Yates's was a landmark. And in its dying days, it filled with pathos where it emptied of customers.

A friend took dinner in the middle of the dance floor, eating fish and chips with his beau while the tables were cleared around him, like a scene from a New York romantic comedy. Where once spit and sawdust marked the lifespan of the pub, the thudding beat of music and the crazed laughter borne from fluorescent apple shots now haunts the place.

It's bound to be an estate agents.

*******

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.