There's a boozer near my home where one of the old lags keeled over and died just as a large coach party drew up. The landlady did not dare to be caught dragging a dead body to the cellar. Well, with pub fare like hers, a visit from health inspectors was not to be countenanced. If there was one pub left in Britain that still had no pretensions to be "gastro'', this was it. It didn't quite serve Spam fritters, but if you asked for the seafood platter you'd be made to feel grateful for a packet of prawn cocktail crisps. Its ploughman's lunch was so heroically hard that, when it thudded before you, tables shook.

Equally, a stiff slumped over the bar was unlikely to do much for passing trade. Coach parties are not overly discerning, but they draw the line at dining with a man already departed to a (much, much) better place. So the panic-stricken publican did what any hospitable landlady would: she propped the expired chap on his stool, as if he were enjoying a rare pause between interminable anecdotes, nursing the same pint of bitter and with a Woodbine still smouldering in the ashtray.

And how appropriate: he had spent his life in the pub, so why not his death? Why should he have had "time'' called on him when no one had even warned him it was "last orders''? After boring everyone else to death, he...