These days, if it’s a rumbustious evening you are looking for – a drunken sing-song extending well into closing time, a noisy altercation in a brutish tongue, a spot of social danger, what’s called local colour – The Jolly Wreckers is your place. Then, when I first arrived in the village and stood disconcerted – my rose flush coming and going – in the picturesque harbour, a mere yard or two from the point of Camilla’s gutting knife, The Spattered Sofa was the pub to go to. And in between times The Sour Grape and The Tight Fist have alternately enjoyed and forfeited favour. Whose turn it will be next there’s no knowing. That will depend on the usual village pub imponderables: the social habits of new arrivals, the death of old loyal drinkers, the state of the landlords’ marriages, the supersession of real by ever realer ale, and above all on the operation of that system of expulsions and rustications known in Castle Boterel as the Ban. Scarcely a night goes by down here, scarcely a night has gone by since I moved here all those years ago, without someone being Banned from some bar somewhere in the village. Essentially the Ban is internecine – to be used by locals on locals. When they invented it there were only locals; and no one has a better grasp than they of its original needfulness. But as the autochthonous population has become watered down by Londoners and Midlanders (and a solitary Jew) so the Ban has become popularized and even – dare I say? – vulgarized. No landlord not actually born in Castle Boterel or thereabouts can hope to remove someone from his bar with the wild spite, the inexplicable explosion of pique of the true-born native – centuries of neglect, isolation, damp and bad diet are needed for that – but what man, let him be howsoever dedicated to the principle of hospitality, does not need to turf somebody out on his arse sometimes? And since the Ban is there, it is a kind of profligacy not to apply it. I swear that I have seen the friendliest of foreign visitors, the most genially anglophile of Germans, sent packing from a pub with instructions not to return for anything up to the life of the current European Parliament as a consequence of some infinitesimal confusion of currency or mispronunciation of a flavour of potato crisps. I myself was once Banned from the bar of The Crushed Emmet for asking the landlord if Camilla had been in before me. ‘I’m not having outsiders squabbling in my pub,’ he told me. ‘You’re Banned.’ ‘How long for?’ I asked him. I knew better, by then, than to argue. ‘Life,’ he told me.