Article
A large overdraft isn't small beer
Good Beer Guide's Roger Protz tells Neasa MacEarlean of his struggles, and those of Britain's pubs
Most people assume that the editor of The Good Beer Guide must be a big drinker, but 60-year-old Roger Protz is anything but. 'I'm remarkably abstemious,' he says. 'I'm not the Private Eye stereotype of a Campaign for Real Ale member: I'm not 22 stone and I don't have a bird's nest beard.'
Part of his self-discipline comes from never having had much money. But it also comes from the way he was introduced to drinking. 'If you go to the pub with your dad - as I did - you learn to drink sensibly. On the Continent, if people go to pubs as a family, they learn to deal with drink as a family. Alcohol problems come from peer drinking, from always going down the pub with six other lads.'
He is disappointed to see so many pub-owners going almost exclusively for the youth market - one pub near his St Albans home employs bouncers to keep older people out. His latest book, Britain's 500 Best Pubs (based on his weekly column for The Observer) has little time for loud and gimmicky places, but highlights the more original ones. Sections on 'pubs in miniature', cricket pubs and 'stars of TV, film and radio' sit alongside more traditional thematic and geographical listings.
A father of two, he has nearly always been a journalist: He 'drifted' into writing about beer when another job fell through and he applied to work for Camra, the Campaign for Real Ale. Since the mid-Seventies, he has written an average of two beer books a year. His only departure from journalism was a 'horrendous' two-year stint as press officer for Islington Council in the mid-Eighties: 'Far from finding a united front of dedicated Socialists, I found a lot of egos scrabbling for town-hall power.'
Despite his productivity he has never had enough money to save or invest. He has 'a very inadequate pension'. This worries him, but is partly redeemed by the fact that he cannot imagine retiring or taking up gardening instead of writing. With no savings accounts and certainly no Peps or Isas, he measures financial success by the size of his overdraft. He can't remember the last time he was in the black. 'It's a wonderful feeling if I'm well below the overdraft limit: it means we can go out for a meal.'
Fortunately, he has a very good relationship with Barclays, where he has banked for the past 20 years. Before that, his socialist principles had taken him to the Co-op Bank: 'It's different now, but the Co-op used to be incredibly inefficient. They actually lost some money of mine. I paid in £60 - a lot then - and although I had the counterfoil, they just denied I'd paid it in. I left, but I never got the money back.'
The overdraft still worries him: 'My parents never had a bank account, so they had to balance their books every week. Having an overdraft is something I've never really come to terms with.'
He has one credit card, a Barclaycard, which is used for two things - 'a real crisis' and paying for 'my one real indulgence', a season ticket to West Ham football club.
But he is not alone in his financial worries. About six pubs close each week; in the countryside, many struggle under the combined force of drink-driving laws and disappearing country buses.
Nevertheless, he thinks the future for Britain's 53,000 pubs could be brighter: 'Pubs are hitting back after a very difficult Nineties. They are making the buildings attractive places to go, and working very hard on the food.'
• 'Britain's Best 500 Pubs', £16.99, is published by Carlton Books.