004 — The Village Stocks (and shares)

An update on the pub, an awkward celebrity encounter — and, in honour of the season, a short history of Oxford witches.

Men in Bramhall stocks, 1900. From the Stockport Image Archive, a collection of images from the Metropolitan Borough of Stockport and surrounding areas dating back to the late 1800s.

We are down in Dorset this week with Joel’s parents for half-term so I’m recording this early — it’s Saturday night, hi! — and scheduling it for Tuesday morning. Feeling altogether on top of my shit, how are you?

I promised an update on the pub and an awkward encounter this week. The two are not unrelated and I intend to deliver. I’m also throwing in a review of the RSC production of Macbeth, which I went to see a couple weeks ago — and which is also not unrelated.

Let’s see if I manage to pull all these bits together in a convincing October-themed tale of enshittification, the macabre and the precious capital of celebrity.

Onwards.

If you need a reminder as to where we are in the tale — which can be summarised as “village tries to buy local pub forced to close by its cashing-out private equity owner” — you can brush up on the background here and here.

So. Community efforts to buy our local pub are continuing apace.

This is the latest news:

We met a pair of fancy chefs and got (briefly) excited because they said all the right things about keeping the pub as a going concern, not just a gastro-pub, and being family-friendly and doing pub quizzes and pulling good pints and community engagement and we all shook hands and felt our prayers had been answered and deliverance was at hand.

Then, the next day they emailed us and said, actually, we’ve changed our minds.

Of course.

We continued to ask people in the village to pledge to buy shares. Pledges stand just north of 80 grand, which is great but not good enough.

So, we ploughed on with applying for government match-funding. If we get it (and, oh boy, it’s a big if), it would cover 75% of the purchase price of our “community asset” (these days, it’s almost always pubs). The application form was, without exaggeration, about 10,000 words long and so knackering it basically gave me Covid. It’s also depressing because this is the result of government slashing all public funding and services: communities individually begging back money for various projects that may or may not suit political ends to grant.

But it’s done and fingers are firmly crossed. Watch this space.

We also held another awareness-raising event — an apple press, replete with bunting and trailers full of apples and merry children — to get people in the village jazzed up about buying their local pub.

At a committee meeting before the apple press event, my friend Helen reminded us that we need to get a local celebrity on board to tweet or ‘gram and bring some starry clout to the bid.

“Who can we ask? There must be some big names.”

This is the Cotswolds and there are definitely some celebrities hiding in the woodwork — but they’re fairly well-hidden. Someone mentioned a member of a very famous 90s BritPop band who lives nearby. Another, an actress from a soap.

“Jill, you’re a sleb magnet. Next time you run into someone famous, make sure you mention the pub.” She’s alluding to my adventures on a street in Paris with a certain comedian and also the fact that I managed to wangle a selfie with none other than Simon Cowell over the summer when I saw him in a local coffee shop. (He’s a lovely man, by the way.)