What my notes for a possible book look like

Fancy joining me, Karl Marx, Samuel Pepys, and Dr Johnson on the razzle?

As I’ve written in a previous newsletter, I have a long list of ideas that are permanently bubbling under on my stove of genius. Some of them à la Monkey Tennis are just the title (e.g. ‘Best books nobody has ever read’), others are a little more fleshed out. Here, as an example of the gems still to be unleashed on lucky commissioning editors, are my notes for ‘A History of Pub Crawls’:

A history of pub crawls. Or a collection of famous ones. Or different kinds

- actual crawls (Micklegate, Monopoly, King Street Run in Cambridge, London Santa Pub Crawl, also https://calendarcustoms.com/articles/york-assize-of-ale/ in York)

travelogue, chapters actually doing each crawl?

Seven-Legged bar crawl, Nottingham.

Transpennine real ale trail, Yorkshire and Lancashire (BBC2 Oz and James Drink to Britain?). Stalybridge Victorian station buffet bar

Otley Run, Leeds

King Street Run, Cambridge [bit like The Sixer in St Albans]

Mumbles Mile, Swansea

OED - crawl [in compound] b. A walk at a leisurely pace. beer-crawl, gin-crawl, pub-crawl: a slow progress from one drinking-place to another. slang. 1877 York Herald 28 Dec. "The project has been mooted in certain temperance circles for establishing a mission solely for women, who are to be searched for in their daily ‘gin crawls’."

1956 novel Maurice Procter’s The Pub Crawler

Gin crawls started in Charles II regin vs plague??

Published: Saturday 24 January 1885
Newspaper: Sporting Times

https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

Pepys goes on a bar crawl - https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/05/28/

Thursday 28 May 1668

Dr Johnson – Fleet Street pub/gin crawl

Boswell. “One night when Beauclerk and Langton had supped at a tavern in London, and sat till about three in the morning, it came into their heads to go and knock up Johnson, and see if they could prevail on him to join them in a ramble. They rapped violently at the door of his chambers in the Temple, till at last he appeared in his shirt, with his little black wig on the top of his head, instead of a nightcap, and a poker in his hand, imagining, probably, that some ruffians were coming to attack him. When he discovered who they were, and was told their errand, he smiled, and with great good humour agreed to their proposal: ‘What, is it you, you dogs! I’ll have a frisk with you.’ He was soon drest, and they sallied forth together into Covent-Garden, where the greengrocers and fruiterers were beginning to arrange their hampers, just come in from the country. Johnson made some attempts to help them; but the honest gardeners stared so at his figure and manner, and odd interference, that he soon saw his services were not relished. They then repaired to one of the neighbouring taverns, and made a bowl of that liquor called Bishop, which Johnson had always liked”

- literary ones (Bloomsday)

- santa ones

- how to organise a pub crawl?

- history of pub crawls

- pub crawls around the world

- pub crawls in tv and film

Karl Marx pub crawl in 1850s - Tottenham Court Road (then and now?) -

McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery by Pete McCarthy 2000

Include a selection of drinking games?

“on the razzle”?

Would you read something like that?