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JEREMY CLARKSON Jeremy Clarkson: Brawls and filthy bogs — what the pub landlord sees After a year at the Farmer’s Dog, there’s been chaos on tap with faddy eaters, fights and customers’ filthy habits. No wonder a pub a day is closing Jeremy Clarkson

Iwas cheered by the heartwarming news last week that the Hollywood actor Rupert Everett has teamed up with about 30 other people from the village of Enford in Wiltshire in a bid to keep their local pub open. He was even photographed behind the bar, pulling pints.

I wish them all the very best, of course. But I’ve had a pub for a year now and I feel duty-bound to point out that behind the bucolic, thatched, “pint of best” image that undoubtedly lives in Rupert’s head, running a pub is harder than eating one. It’s harder than anything. Even farming.

Of course there are good days. My pub’s called the Farmer’s Dog and on a visit last week I sat in the garden, in the sunshine, with a pint of my own beer, chowing down on a pizza made with dough from my own farm, and it was rural perfection. There was a gaggle of little kids doing handstands and dogs lazing in the warmth and families enjoying the live band that serenades the customers on a Friday evening. I was bathed in a Ready Brek glow of absolute happiness.

However, Rupert should be aware that some aspects of pub ownership do cause a landlord’s shoulders to sag a bit. And I’m not talking about the ludicrous taxes that publicans have to pay, or the difficulties of finding staff, or the issues with national insurance.

That’s all common knowledge. I’m talking about the stuff that isn’t. For example: a lady came to my pub recently and after enjoying several glasses of our wonderful Hedgerow cider, had a stumble and then tripped over her hair extensions, which caused her to vomit explosively into her own cleavage. Rupert probably isn’t ready for that situation, and he certainly won’t be prepared for what happened next. She fished handfuls of the sick from her bra and then passed it to our manageress.

Or how about this one? A little girl in the garden became a bit upset because a little boy from the next table had nicked one of the pine cones she was using to build a castle. History doesn’t relate what happened next, but whatever it was, the two fathers decided that the only solution was to try to strangle each other.

And then there was the eight-year-old girl who locked the lavatory door and then panicked because she couldn’t unlock it. This caused onlookers to visit our garden shed, find a crowbar and then lever the door off its hinges. It’s now a splintered ruin in a skip, alongside the pub sign that someone reversed into the other day.

These are isolated incidents, but Rupert should be aware they do happen from time to time. What happens a lot more are visits from food intolerance enthusiasts who will claim after they left that you poisoned them and that you must now give them 50,000 of your pounds.

We had one the other day who said she’d been given beer instead of cider and the gluten in it had made her so ill she’d had to cancel her holiday and we now had to reimburse her. Happily, we have her on CCTV not drinking beer, so we are safe on that one. But often landlords aren’t so lucky. Many tell me this food intolerance fraud is now an epidemic.

And even when it isn’t fraudulent, it’s still annoying, because these faddy eaters demand that the kitchen staff jump through hoops to ensure they will not be served anything that might upset them. And then they have an ice cream for pudding, saying, “Oh well, a little bit of dairy won’t hurt.” I’m seriously thinking of banning people with food intolerances. I know it would be commercial suicide but they are just so annoying.

I have to talk about lavatories at this point and ask why so many people plainly do not know how to use them. It baffles me because if you are sitting down to do a poo, how do you then miss the bowl? I don’t know the answer because we don’t have CCTV in the cubicles but I do know that one day, after all the staff have left for the night, Rupert’s going to check the loos in his pub and find that someone has pebbledashed the walls with a gallon of diarrhoea.

Oh, and he should also be aware that there’s a man on TikTok who films himself urinating on the floor in pubs if he feels the beer is too expensive. I’d actually like to catch this guy as I’d very much like to kill him.

Now. Staff. Hmmm. I want to make it plain that the guys and girls who work at my pub are brilliant. Their ability to keep smiling when someone has just announced they’re allergic to oxygen genuinely beggars belief and I love them all. Nearly.

Because occasionally you do get a wrong ’un. And then what do you do? Well you have to be careful because if you fire them, they will find a great-grandmother who was born in Uganda and hey presto, they’ve got you on a racism rap. And then you’re in a world of pain. You fire them for being a wastrel and they accuse you of being a racist. So you lose.

Still, the subsequent unpleasantness will at least take your mind off the cooking oil that was nicked from your kitchen last night, and the missive from the building inspector saying you’ve got to spend £1 million on new fire escapes that the planners won’t let you have.

This is why one pub in the UK is closing every single day at the moment. It’s hard enough dealing with all of the vomit and the faeces and the fights, but when you factor in the local authority, and taxation, and the government’s exciting new laws on workers’ rights, it becomes nigh-on impossible to stay sane.

Oh, and how’s this for an ending? We were hacked at the Farmer’s Dog last week and swindled out of £27,000.