3 hours ago
4
The Hand & Heart, Nottingham
When I was a teenager, before Tripadvisor, pubs lived as mental notes rather than star ratings. There was the one where – exactly like that scene in The Inbetweeners – we realised they’d serve us a pint at 16 if we ordered some food (one shared plate of chips). There was the one you might get lucky in on Christmas Eve; the one you’d take a girl to, to impress her with the romantic views; and the one that only served cider in halves because it was so brain cell-poppingly strong – a pub best tackled before a bank holiday Monday, known colloquially as “Super Cider Sunday”, when you still had a few brain cells to spare.
When I arrived at university, the pub that became my second home was the Hand & Heart. Like Nottingham’s other famous pub, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem (which claims to be the oldest pub in England), it’s carved into the city’s sandstone caves, a setting that means you get to feel like Batman sipping a brandy after a hard day’s crime fighting. It was also our true local, just a quick stagger from the student house six of us shared – which became both an incentive and a deterrent. While our peers would start drinking at 7pm or 8pm, we had a reputation for rolling up for last orders, meaning we could leave the house at 10.20pm, be pint in hand by 10.30pm and – if we necked them fast – get two or maybe three in before the big lights flickered on.
But what we got really good at were the pub quiz machines. Rather than making polite chit-chat with our fellow student drinkers, the six of us would stand around the Monopoly machine like a trivia mafia syndicate. With our combined student knowledge covering nearly every base (Phil – politics; Tony – history; Becca – French and Spanish; Saz – French and management; me – chemistry; the other Rich – economics) and the fact that the questions kept repeating themselves, we could turn 50p stakes into profit. As a side hustle, Phil and I got whizzy at the Noel Edmonds Telly Addicts quiz machine. This relied on our other specialist subject, TV, and was, gloriously, a prize game you could win with practice. Just one or two games, each with a 50p stake, and we’d win the £5 jackpot. Thanks, Noel.
I’d love to claim the Hand & Heart taught me something profound: the power of collective intelligence; that two (or six) heads are better than one; that a worry shared (even over a multiple-choice trivia game) is a worry halved. But honestly, it was mostly about bankrolling free rounds, then the post-pub kebab ritual from Sheesh Mahal, where every customer was greeted with the same question – open or wrapped? In other words, would you like your kebab wrapped to eat with the dignity of a knife, fork and plate when you got home? (Tony.) Or open to eat on the walk home, with kebab sauce dribbling down your chin, the remnants and wrappings neatly disposed of over a handy garden wall? (Me and everybody else.)
