A genuinely small, genuinely stupid, genuinely wonderful piece of ongoing local London theatre, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
My local pub has, for reasons nobody can now fully reconstruct, a small ceramic corgi statue behind the bar that has become the subject of one of the longest-running, lowest-stakes disagreements I have ever personally witnessed, a genuinely three-year debate about whether it should be moved, replaced, or left exactly where it is, that shows absolutely no sign of resolving itself.
The core disagreement, as best I can reconstruct it after several increasingly detailed conversations with regulars, centres on whether the statue constitutes a genuine, if slightly kitsch, tribute worth preserving, or an outdated bit of pub decor that ought to make way for something less specifically tied to the monarchy and more broadly reflective of the pub’s actual current clientele.
What makes this genuinely wonderful, rather than simply tedious, is the sheer sustained commitment both sides have brought to an argument with essentially zero real stakes. I have watched grown adults debate this specific ceramic dog with a passion usually reserved for matters of considerably greater consequence, complete with historical precedent, appeals to pub tradition, and at least one occasion where someone brought in printed material.
The landlord, to his considerable credit, has adopted a position of studied neutrality throughout, neither committing to remove the statue nor formally endorsing its permanent place behind the bar, a diplomatic non-position that has, if anything, only prolonged the debate by refusing either side the satisfaction of a clear resolution.
I find myself, three years in, genuinely hoping this never actually gets resolved. Some disagreements are better left permanently, happily unsettled, a small recurring bit of communal theatre that gives regulars something to argue about that costs nothing and harms nobody, which is, in its own modest way, a genuinely lovely thing for a local pub to sustain.
For more on how small-scale royal ephemera ends up scattered across ordinary British life in ways like this, see News Parody.
More from this author at Isla Campbell, prat.uk.