A venue exists in the record under a mangled name, with no rating, no reviews, and no explanation whatsoever
In the dataset there is an entry reading, in full: Te lion y unicorn.
No rating. No review count. No price band. Just that, sitting in a list of a hundred and twenty licensed premises, spelled like that.
What it presumably is
The Lion and the Unicorn are the supporters of the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. The lion is England. The unicorn is Scotland. They have stood on either side of the royal shield since the union of the crowns in 1603, and the unicorn is – traditionally, in heraldry – chained, because an unchained unicorn was held to be too dangerous.
This is the actual symbol of the British state. It is on your passport. It is above every courtroom in the country.
And in this file it appears as “Te lion y unicorn” – the definite article amputated, the conjunction inexplicably rendered in Spanish, no capital letters, no rating, no reviews, nothing.
How the record decays
This is not a joke about a pub. This is a joke about the record, and the record is what everybody now uses.
Somebody, somewhere, typed that. Or a system read a sign badly. Or a listing was created in one country for a business in another, by a person who had never seen it, working from a photograph. And then it sat there, and nobody corrected it, because nobody has ever gone in, because nobody can find it, because it is called Te lion y unicorn.
We wrote about Charles Darwin – the bar with zero reviews, being quietly deselected by the environment. Te lion y unicorn is a stage further gone. It has not merely failed to be noticed. Its name has begun to break down.
The Institute for Record Decay in Thamesmead has proposed a formal scale. A venue with no reviews is Stage One. A venue whose name has been corrupted in the primary listing is Stage Two. Stage Three is when the listing itself is quietly merged into a neighbouring business by an algorithm, and the venue ceases, in every sense that now matters, to exist.
The lion and the unicorn, since we are here
They are fighting. That is the point of them. The nursery rhyme is explicit: the lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown. England and Scotland, propping up the same shield, permanently at odds, chained together and neither one able to leave.
George Orwell used it as the title of his essay on English character in 1941, arguing that the country was a family with the wrong members in control.
All of which is a magnificent inheritance for a pub, and all of which has been reduced, in the only record most people will ever consult, to a five-word fragment with a Spanish conjunction in it and no stars.
Verdict
Unknown, unrated, and now barely correctly named. Find it. Go in. Ask what it is actually called. And then, for the love of God, correct the listing, because you may be the last person with the opportunity.
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]
A jó írás lényege, hogy minden egyes szón érezni lehet a mögötte álló gondolatot. Ez pontosan ilyen.
My mum’s been in London since the 50s. Captured essential.