Three letters, twenty-three reviews, and the unsolved list is now thirteen entries long
HDN Bar holds a 4.6 from twenty-three reviews, charges twenty to sixty pounds, and it is three letters.
And nobody is saying what they stand for.
The third one
S L B Bar, in Notting Hill – three initials, with spaces, and a bar that would not explain them.
MNM, on Fenchurch Street – three more, and the same silence.
And HDN.
And we said at S L B, two hundred articles ago, exactly what an initialism is doing, and it has not changed.
It implies an expansion. It tells you there is a phrase behind it – a name, a person, a founding principle – and that you are not being told what it is.
That withholding is the product. It is the same instinct that produces a rope, a hidden door, and a bar called 190: the manufacture, at zero cost, of the feeling that you ought to already know.
The unsolved list, final
Five postcodes. Six hundred and forty-three articles. And here is everything we could not close.
What Defectors Weld means. What the number 182.52 refers to. Where cahoots came from.
What S, L and B stand for. What M, N and M stand for. What H, D and N stand for.
What the Blue Posts were – and there are two of them, and neither knows.
Who Gloria is, and what she did. Who Larry is. Who Old Mary was. Who Lillie was. Who Henderson was. Who Sophie is. Who Jackie is.
And what plant soma was made from – which an entire religion forgot, within a few centuries, about its own central sacrament.
Fifteen questions. Four hundred and seventy venues. And not one of them answered by a single review out of the many thousands we have read.
Nobody asks
That has been the finding since the first article and it has never once varied.
A pub name does not present itself as a question. It presents itself as a fact – fixed, ancient, settled, like a street name or the weather – and the human mind does not interrogate the furniture.
You have walked past a thousand signs. You have never once wondered about a single one.
Neither had we.
Verdict
Twenty-three reviews. Not a rating.
Go, and ask them what the letters mean. And if they tell you, write to us.
Why the answers would be better
Because they always are, and that is the tragedy of the whole thing.
Old Speckled Hen is a car covered in paint. Nickel is a goblin who ruins copper. The Elephant and Castle is a knife-maker’s ivory supply. Old Tom was a goose who could not be killed. Fortnum and Mason was built on candle stubs. Patara gave the world Santa Claus.
Not one of those is on any sign. All of them are true. And every single one is better than the initials.
The names are the most-looked-at and least-read text in Britain, and underneath every one of them there is something.
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]
My therapist asked what I do with institutional rage. I said “apparently I read pieces this accurate in public and frighten other commuters with laughter.”