Bar or Pub?

What is the difference between a bar and a pub?

Silly question. There are maybe as many answers as there are people asked this question.

I only want to give my own definition and you can make of it what you will.

I have noticed two distinct situations. In the one case, you have a group of two or more people who are going to go out somewhere for the evening. Maybe for a meal, maybe for a few drinks, maybe for a walk. In this situation, the social group is the given and it is that group that chooses a place or places to be together and enjoy their evening or afternoon together.

On the other hand, you have the situation where an individual goes out to a specific place. This may be the train spotters club or the knitting circle and so on. In this case, the social group is at that particular venue.

So when it comes to an evening where alcohol is involved, you have the same two situations - a social group that goes to one or more venues, taking the social group to each place. The social group is primary. The other situation is where a person goes to a particular place for the social group they will find there and has a few drinks while engaging in that social group.

The place for the first situation is what I call a bar. The place for the second is what I call a pub. It just hinges on whether the social group is formed before the outing or already exists at the venue.

The existing social group in a pub, as I define it, is made up of people that the publican and others would refer to as "the regulars". In such a place, I have heard the people who come in as an already existing social group for a couple of drinks before moving on referred to as the "randoms".

Of course, a bar does not have regulars as such and caters specifically for the social group custom. A bar is more likely to have happy hour and 2-for-1 specials to woo the nomadic drinking groups.

A pub does not have to do much at all. It has its regulars, some of whom will be there most days, summer or winter, rain or shine, money in the till as regular as clockwork - ker-ching.

Another way of looking at it is one the one hand you have people who get in a group and go out to drink. On the other you have people who go to meet and talk with mates and have drinks as part of that process. The primary purpose is different.

The first group consists of people who are more likely to "do shost" and end up marauding the streets on a friday night, bereft of speech and only communicating in neo-simian whoops and calls. The second group consists of people who do not intend to get drunk, put away a fair few of their regular tipple and bid a polite goodnight to all, making their way home alone and unstripped of the power of speech.

But these are only my own observations across 6 countries and 20 years.

Music, culture and enforced immigration

I was talking to a girl in Wellington who said that Christchurch was musically uninteresting because she and her friends could not find any live hip-hop music there.

And my mind drifted off as usual. I was thinking about music genres and their origins and how many people take a liking to music that is not of their culture. Why not? Hey, I like celtic music and I am not celtic, although I do have Welsh and Scottish ancestors, so I suppose that could be a factor.

And in a flight of fancy I thought about people, forcibly taken from their own country and put to work in a far away land. I thought of the music they brought with them and the way they kept their own cultural origins alive with song and story. And I thought of how in the "host" country, their music became a major influence of that country's musical traditions. And how the music from that host nation finds its way all over the world. It has its own style and is easily recognisable as regards its origin to all who have a reasonable ear.

Of course, I am talking about Australia and the transportation of people having in the main irish or cockney ancestry from their homes into a foreign and hostile land, where they worked hard in captivity until they died or were eventually freed.

And so the irish ballads are not only alive and well in the old songs of Australia but their influence lives on in latter day song-writers and performers. So what problem is there if others can relate to those songs and the culture that gave them birth?

Which brings me to the USA. Did you think earlier that was the country I was going to talk about. Same difference as far as I can see. People taken from their home country, made to work, died or were freed, developed their own songs and stories based on their own culture, that genre being developed and becoming mainstream in the host country, that music listened to all over the world regardless of cultural difference.

Seems the same to me.