Jimmy Nobs

 

Jimmy himself is a bit of a lad; tall, strong, short-tempered, and only loosely acquainted with the principles of customer service. If you’re a visitor and ask for an Americano, for instance, he will stare at you as though you’ve just requested a blood test. Then he’ll inform you, with some feeling, that you can have instant or nothing.

He milks it. He sugars it. He does both even if you’ve explicitly said you don’t take sugar. He does not see this as interference; he sees it as visionary management. Still, the mugs are clean. We must be grateful.

Jimmy Nobs once rode with hounds, shot game on dewy mornings. He always found himself on the winning side of any hunt largely because he arrived late, once fell asleep under a beech tree and was briefly hunted by three dogs and a man in a red coat. He was mistaken for a fox. The story varies depending on who’s telling it of course.

Privilege has chased him like one of those glamorous aristocratic debutantes he outran at every country ball in his youth. Eton taught him to fence, to ride, and that most rules were suggestions except the ones about not tipping bowls of trifle into the school pond which he freely admits to. 

Yet here he is; landlord of the village pub. He is quietly known for an almost mystical ability to help you be happy. Not just happiness, come to think of it: comfort, distraction, warmth, forgetfulness, clarity … pick a state, and he’ll serve you something that will almost, technically, qualify

If the fire’s lit, you’ll find him coaxing reluctant logs into cheerful flames (with a whisky in hand, naturally). If the mood is dull, he’ll break out tales of a raunchy one-eyed bartender in Buenos Aires in 1987. He’s learned more about human behaviour from bar stools than most psychologists do from their sofas.

And yet … and yet beneath the perpetual scowl lives someone who once wept openly at the sight of a sunset that looked “just like the west windows of King’s Chapel at dusk.” He said the light made him feel “unreasonably philosophical about school poetry.”

So if you wander into Jimmy’s domain hungry for coffee, ready for a latte … be warned, you might end up with something a lot more interesting.