Students, have you got worse grades for your exams than you or your parents and teachers were expecting/hoping for? Cant do your A levels now or attend university?
Well if you have ITS YOUR OWN FAULT!
Now I don’t mean its your own fault because you haven’t done enough revision and didn’t pay enough attention during the school year, or that your just plain thick, no its your own fault because you haven’t spent enough time down the pub!
At this point in this posting your teachers and parents reading this will be horrified and in denial. How can it be that the fool writing this is saying that you have messed up your exams by not going to the pub? They will be blaming themselves. They think they should have supported you more. They could have given you more one to one tuition. They could have explained things better. None of that is accurate, all they had to do was take you to THE PUB! Here is an explanation of why . . . . . . . . . . .
Trying to learn stuff from books and by listening to teachers is hard and boring. That type of learning is difficult because t doesn’t feel real. The only way to learn stuff is to use knowledge in practical ways. Lets take a look at a couple of typical school/college subjects and see what the pub has to offer.
MATHS– loads of practical uses for maths in the pub.
First off you have your traditional pub games. Darts for example. In darts you have to do rapid adding up calculations involving three numbers in your head and then do some subtraction on the scoreboard. You also need to be able to work out instantly what you need to throw in order to get the required score e.g. 139? Easy, its treble 20 (60), treble 19 (57) and then double 11. Piece of cake for an experienced pub goer, much harder in a classroom.
When playing pool you need a rudimentary understanding of angles. And if your playing a game of poker in the pub the required calculations are enormous as you try to work out the odds of ‘hitting’ the card you need, calculating the percentage of winning and deciding what to bet compared to whats in the pot. Those calculations are done instantly by seasoned pub poker players.
Then you have more advanced mathematical topics. If on a tight budget you might try to work out which drinks to buy based on the cheapest price per alcoholic unit. Thats not easy to work out because drinks in pubs are not sold that way.
For example which is better:
Pint of Stella at £3.20 abv 5.2% OR
Pint of Fosters at £2.60 abv 4.4% ?
Marginally, the Stella is better value in the volume-of-alcohol-per-pound stakes. These are things that you need to know. Being able to work this out correctly will bring you up to a very good mathematical standard.
Ok thats enough of maths, lets think about a different subject.
Local History- everyday in every pub you will find a group of people, usually older men, having an in depth conversation about local history. All you have to do is listen (whilst drinking of course) and join in if you want to. They will try to remember what buildings were before their current use, who owned which shop and what happened to them and they will also talk about historical local events like murders, fires and domestic gossip. Loads can be gleaned by the eager student from these conversations particularly if you need to complete a local history project for school or college. These conversations invariably drift and around and go off on tangents and if you listen long enough you will probably get a good Geography lesson as well.
By visiting the pub you will also gain all the social skills that you will ever need in life. I dont think ‘social skills’ is a subject taught in schools but maybe it should be because it will touch every area of your life. If you had gone to the pub you will have learnt about conflict management, fight dynamics (if you haven’t mastered conflict management yet), round-buying etiquette and not to get involved in ‘domestics’.
Heres an example of a domestic:
If you went to the pub more you would know how sometimes pubs just fall quiet for a moment or two. The couple having an argument at the bar of a pub I was running found this out to their cost when the pub fell silent just as the bloke shouted to his girlfriend ‘I shaved my arse for you!!!’.
Theres a lesson for us all there! 
So anyway you have messed up your exams but maybe its not too late for you. If your doing resits try GOING TO THE PUB MORE!
George Cusick, taxi driver, driving instructor, student. 