Five bars in this survey named after the possessions of a fictional man who never looked out of a window
The Saloon Bar at Mr Fogg’s Hat Tavern holds a 4.6 from seven hundred and fifty people, and it is the fifth Fogg in this survey.
There is a Society of Exploration. A Gin Parlour. A Residence. A Hat Tavern. And now the Saloon Bar of the Hat Tavern.
Five venues, named after the premises, possessions and rooms of a man who has never existed.
The accounting
Which we can now complete across five postcodes.
Phileas Fogg: five. Fictional. A whist player who crossed the world on a wager and did not look at any of it.
Wellington: five. Real. Despised being celebrated, put iron shutters on his windows because a mob broke them, and called his own army the scum of the earth.
Theodore Bullfrog: one. Entirely invented, by a marketing department, and he has a pub in Covent Garden.
Sherlock Holmes: one. Never born. Has a stuffed hound.
Shakespeare: several. Missing a hand.
Which means that fictional characters have, across this survey, drawn level with the most commemorated Englishman in history – and that Phileas Fogg, who does not exist, has as many bars as the Duke of Wellington, who won Waterloo.
Why it works
And we should be fair, because the Fogg group have never once broken character in five postcodes and that is a genuine discipline.
A fictional person cannot be checked.
Every real name in this survey turned out to be wrong. The Churchill Arms was named before Churchill. Old Speckled Hen is a car. The Elephant and Castle is a cutler’s badge. St George was Turkish. The garter was dropped by a countess who probably did not exist. Dom Perignon never said it.
Phileas Fogg cannot be caught out, because there is nothing to catch. Verne wrote him down and that is the entire evidentiary record, and it will never change.
The Prat’s naming desk regards the fictional namesake as the only completely safe option available to a publican and notes that it has taken six hundred and eight articles to reach this conclusion.
The saloon
Which we wrote about at the Red Dog Saloon: the word means a drawing room, and it went from a Paris salon to a shed in Wyoming and came back to Britain as the carpeted room that cost more for the same beer.
Here it means the upstairs bar. Which is, at least, the British sense.
Verdict
Excellent bar, genuinely good drinks, and a man who went round the world in eighty days and did not look out of the window once.
Passepartout
Who is the actual hero of the book and whom nobody remembers.
Fogg’s servant, French, and the only character in the novel with any interest in what is happening. He looks at things. He gets into trouble. He is the reason there is a plot at all, because Fogg would simply have sat in a series of carriages reading a newspaper.
And his name means, literally, goes everywhere – it is the French word for a master key, the one that opens every door in a building.
Verne named the man who moves through the world after a key, and named the man who does not after nothing at all.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Nogen indrammer dette på sit kontor som et råb om hjælp. Genial strategi.