Tales from the bar side

If you go down to the pub today, it'll be no big surprise if you hear (or overhear) some great stories. There's something about being clustered around a wooden table with a plentiful supply of alcohol on tap that releases the narrative urge in us all. Fact and fiction blur as often and as quickly as eyesight.

Some pubs, of course, not only have yarns spun within their walls but are actually intimately connected to those tales, their tellers and the characters who populate them. The Joiners Arms in Morpeth - the town where I was born, raised and spent most of my days, to paraphrase the beginning of someone else's tale - is just such a pub, and one of its regulars, Gordon Wilkinson Sr, has gathered together a collection of its most colourful stories in a new book, 'No. 7 Wansbeck Street'.

Unpretentious and welcoming, the Joiners has been a regular haunt for all sorts of people down the years - "heroes, murderers, madmen, aristocrats, artists, assassins, arseholes, elephants, rock stars, scientists, spooks, the good, the bad and the cuddly" - and all duly find a place in the book. Perhaps most interesting given the pub's location in a small Northumbrian market town is its connections to places all over the globe - from Africa to the Antarctic.

Next time I'm itching for a pint, I can justify going to the pub by saying I'm off to do some research for a book of my own…