Once a bit of a drinker, I approach a pub these days like Philip Larkin putting his head around a church door, curious in spite of myself. He was never a believer, of course, but I half hope to experience the magic of licensed premises all over again. When I was working on news bulletins, we’d go to the pub after the programme and there were sometimes lock-ins. Bar staff rattling up the shutters one morning found a cameraman sleeping it off in the Gents. ‘Booze at Ten’, said The Sun’s front page. On a press junket in Provence earlier this year, I heard myself declining an aperitif of the unequalled local rosé with the rueful observation, ‘Lunchtime drinking is a young man’s game.’

Now the youthful team at The Fence magazine have put together an anthology of writing about pubs that almost tempts me back to the Dog and Duck. It’s not The Good Pub Guide, though contributors do namecheck favourite watering holes. Nor is it a jeremiad about the threatened institution of the public house, though it does acknowledge that Britain has lost more than three thousand of them in the past six years. It’s more like a tip sheet for those who have taken the pledge, or who guilelessly drink wherever their thirst takes them, a travel guide to pubs cool and hip. ‘We’ve done our very best to create the perfect pub in book form,’ says an unsigned introduction, almost certainly by the hand of Charlie Baker, the tyro William Randolph Hearst figure behind The Fence. ‘You’ll find reminiscences of pubs past, tall tales about pub regulars, jokes of varying repeatability.’

Fergus Butler-Gallie, an Anglican priest and no stranger to these pages, visits what he claims is the only pub in a motorway service station and has a pint or seven (plus two double G&Ts). I once spent weeks in a motel on the M1 for Newsnight during a general election