Ale house readings, spiritual zest, and the inevitable crapulous effect: a pub, the public house, the inn, the tavern, that home that functions between your actual home and the funeral rites that lie ahead, a space where so much living is done, the indifferent years passing in unnoticed flow. “There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern,” the garrulous lexicographer Samuel Johnson is documented as saying in March, 1776. “There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”