Blipper's shock as pub put up to rent

Over the last few months I've watched the once-iconic Golden Fleece Pub on Nelson Street transform itself into a rather more conventional-looking countryish pub. Gone is the maroon pub sign with the saxophone on it, and gone too the inverted Guinness sign. A tasteful paint job, a more ordinary sign, a general tidying up of the outside, and Bingo! It's ready for the market.

I should explain. Twenty years ago, when I worked at Gaia Books, a publishing house in the High Street, a colleague came in and told me that The Golden Fleece, just up the road, had been transformed from 'an old mens' pub' into something we might want to go to. From then on, it became my pub. I recall that there were newspapers, for the reading of, in a rack made of old locally-made walking sticks! There were two coal fires, eventually two snugs at the back, and finally a beer garden. It got very snug in the snugs.

Our writing group used to meet in the back-back snug, where the wonky chairs were stored. One poet, who was well over twenty stone, sat on one which promptly collapsed. I do check chairs rather carefully these days when I am organising groups!
There was a knitting group that met there when knitting got fashionable, and live music every Thursday and at weekends. Elvis played there too, I am told, after his death. When the power in my flat went out, I went there to sit by the fire. A friend and I were rumoured to be having an affair because we went there together so often. A guy I met there while escaping from someone else who was weird, became my boyfriend. (He was dark and brooding, sitting on an oak settle, reading, on a busy Friday night. I should have known about those dark, brooding types, but no, I had to find out...)

There were landlords with names beginning with R: Rocky, and Rodda, and Stroud's landlord of landlords, Andy Thomas, who ran The Pelican in Union Street before it closed. He died around 2000, and his funeral cortege jived past my window in Whitehall on its way to the cemetery.

Rodda moved on (he thrives on challenge) to our local, the Crown and Sceptre, which he transformed from a dingy dive to a vibrant house of music and ale and meetings of minds. The heart and customers went out of the Fleece, and two years ago it was rumoured to have closed. It reopened a few months later, but I have to admit I haven't set foot in it for years, because it became a sad place for lonely drinkers. I said I'd go back to to the pub more often when the smoking ban came in, but that was seven years ago! The wine is cheaper at home, and I don't have to shout to be heard.

So, there goes another one. How the mighty.... Stroud had scores of neighbourhood pubs, when it had its own brewery. They had wonderful names such as the Green Dragon and the Forester's Arms. Now they are mostly gone, and I am sounding like an old timer myself, instead of the raw young newcomer I was when the Golden Fleece had its Golden Phoenix moment in the summer of '94.