Foot Rails.

All good pubs should have a foot rail. One of those brass rails that run along the bottom of the customers side of the bar, where the seasoned barfly can place one foot when planted in his favourite spot. Foot rails always take me back to the 70's when the bars in city pubs would often be populated by middle aged men with camelhair coats and pencil thin mustaches who lent on the bar with one foot on the rail and greeted each other with lines like 'Whats your poison, squire' and when someone bought them a drink would often thank them with the phrase ' You are a gentleman and a scholar, sir'. Such fellows inevitably smoked small, and very smelly cigars and spent the entire evening gazing down the cleavage of the rotund, middle aged barmaid who usually bore a striking resemblance to a character in a painting by Beryl Cook no doubt wondering if they just had a couple more scotch on the rocks whether they might invite her out after the pub closed, although one doubts that many of them ever got that lucky.

The female partners of such flash gents rarely got near the bar, being usually confined to the snug with their glasses of Snowball to be eyed up from a distance by the spotty teenage lads trying to get a drink underage in the 'Jug and Bottle'.

The flash gents are now gone along with the cigars into pub folklore but in a good pub the foot rails remain, lets all ensure that they do so.

Along with the barmaids with the cleaveges, of course .