‘I might be over 60, but I still enjoy my Friday nights out’

My wife, Jacqui, and I meet up with a gang of our friends every Friday. There are 10 of us all sitting round a very large oval table, in a nice position handy to the bar and the food serving hatch, and with an elegant A4 size show-card on it announcing, Reserved for the Friday Nighters, (that’s us!).

Not the most exciting way to start the weekend I admit, but all of us are well past the flower of our youth, so we don’t often go out looking for fights or cars to wreck these days! What we do is chat, eat and enjoy a couple of drinks in a warm, friendly atmosphere, not restricting our chatter to our own group either — we all know almost everyone in the pub on a Friday evening and so there’s usually a floating population of people who stop for a word or two, before they go to find a table for themselves.

The Commercial Hotel in Yarram — where this saga takes place — is fairly large by country standards, though I know quite a few places in Melbourne, where the whole of our pub would fit into just the bar! It has two main rooms, the public bar and the bistro, and our table is situated in the bistro. It gets pretty crowded and lively on a Friday night, with a meat raffle, plus a special jackpot that grows week by week. It involves a glass fronted cupboard filled with playing cards, only their backs visible — the winner has drawn a number from a bucket, then selects a playing card from the cupboard, different value cards paying out various prizes, with the Joker being the jackpot; the last time the pot was won the amount was more than $3,000! Don’t forget, the odds of picking the joker at the start of the series is 53 to one against, improving as each week goes by, and another card is chosen, until someone is fortunate to find the joker!

One of the main reasons we stick to this hotel is that the food served there is very good as well as being reasonably priced, always an important factor when you’re looking for a local for yourself. The quality of food and cooking in the kitchen is consistent and there are always new menu items offered, on the specials mirror, some of them decidedly exotic!

Our gang is quite a mixed group, with a ship’s chandler and his wife; a retired farrier/Vietnam veteran and his lovely wife, a retired hairdresser; a semi-retired dairy farmer/share-milker and his wife, one the town’s great volunteers; a retired cabinet maker; and a retired lady publican; plus Jacqui and I, both retired, me from graphics and Jacqui from health care. The considerable variations in our occupations can lead to some really interesting subjects of conversation (and I really mean that — no sarcasm intended). Moreover, we all have a good laugh because none of us are terribly serious in our attitudes to life, it’s only when you’re young that everything seems to be serious!

In a small country town like ours, there’s no doubt that the pub plays a larger part in the day to day life of the place, after all there’s not really a lot else going on, no night clubs, no theatres (not on a nightly basis anyway), and very little in the way of facilities for night-time sport. One other facility that our town can boast, the Country Club, offers facilities and food quite similar to the Commercial Hotel, plus the big money earner (the only one thank goodness) — the pokies! A lot of pubs and clubs have closed down over the years, because they can’t produce enough profit to exist without these machines, which is sad because although they undoubtedly provide the profit needed to stay in business, it means there are a lot of local people suffering hardship because so much of their hard-earned money is being swallowed up by the ‘monsters’ with bar facilities!

Anyway, thank goodness our friendly pub still seems to be succeeding, against the odds, using imaginative ways of keeping clientele from leaving for other sources of entertainment, and by providing the best and friendliest service he can. We don’t want to lose our Friday night out with friends… It’s about all we have at our age!

Is there a place like this that holds special importance for bringing people together for you? How do you spend your Friday nights?

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