I WAS originally an engineering officer in the merchant navy and quickly learnt that there were certain strict rules at sea. Whistling was, I believe, a keelhauling offence. Allegedly, because you could be accused of whistling up the wind or a storm.

More sensibly, I thought, because superheated steam could make a whistling sound if it found a leak thus threatening anybody’s life if they happened to walk through it.

Killing an albatross was also frowned upon, but luckily, unlike my propensity to whistle, I never felt tempted.

But the most emotive issue was the subject of conversations within the bar. Debates involving sex, religion and politics were banned. Sex I soon realised was sensibly a no-go area due to the number of tortured souls who were worried about what their partner was up to at home. It could literally drive some people crazy; particularly as in one case where a well-meaning chap rejoined a ship after a period at home, only to tell his fellow-sailor best friend, after a few drinks, that he’d seen his friend’s wife out with another man. He probably wouldn’t have told him if he’d been sober. Hence the ban.

Religion? Well countless wars due to the subject make it an obvious subject to avoid; particularly as the profession often recruited from sectarian cities such as Liverpool or Glasgow.

So that leaves politics, which is another subject that seems to get people excited. You just need to read the Northern Echo’s Hear All Sides or follow the Scottish independence arguments. So that was banned as well which disappointed me because I find most politics entertaining; what with its shot-termism and egodriven politicians – no matter what their political affinities.

Well, I left the merchant navy many years ago, but I still enter the occasional bar. And there is one particular arrangement I keep with two close friends where, holidays and death aside, we meet every week to talk about... well, anything. No holds barred and some of it intelligent.

I recently raised the subject, at one such meeting, about how those three subjects were often banned in bars at sea. So, it being a Sunday, over the first pint we had a quick go at religion. Obviously, that moved us onto the Middle East and over the second and third pints the subject went this way and that but, possibly because of my owning a restaurant, started us rather amusingly (or so we thought) discussing: if politics was a restaurant, what would it be like?

Well, for a start, you’d never be bored with the food because the menu would be changing all the time. In fact it would be altered to such an extent that all the staff would have to reapply for their jobs and be retrained in new positions; never knowing from one day to the next whether it was worth learning the current menu. It would even get to the point that, as a customer, you’d be asked what you wanted and then, with a smile, you’d be given something totally different, and told it’s what you really wanted in the first place. And you might even begin to believe it.

Some of the staff would be so idealistically driven that no matter what you really wanted, they’d decide for you because that particular dish won’t destroy the environment according to some recent study they’d heard about but not really understood. Others would have a special pocket sewn into their aprons in order to receive large gratuities in brown envelopes and another from which to hand out honours. And customers might even be given a target calorie count and be forced to merge with other tables if they didn’t meet their performance indicators.

We even got to imagining the company accountant delivering the monthly financial report with a smile while robbing the wine merchant to pay the butcher. It lends a whole new meaning to the phrase “cooking the books”.

And you wouldn’t be able to expect to just migrate into a new restaurant and be given a table. No, you’d be forced to sit an exam demonstrating that you knew about, believed in and could understand the English menu.

Which, of course as described earlier, would depend of the whim of those in power – sorry, in charge – and might depend on what day of the week it was. And if you failed you’d be told to sit in the waiting area for a while before being forced to leave and sent back to that restaurant from which you originally came.

We came up with lots of other ideas but beer has a habit of making me forget things. Which maybe I should because, during the next pint, I think we then moved onto the final banned subject: sex. Well isn’t that what blokes are supposed to talk about over a few pints? It’s a lot like politics: we discuss a subject about which we know very little.