A MAN walks into a pub. He has a few drinks and a good natter. But when he returns a few weeks later, he finds the place has been closed down.

Sadly, it’s a familiar story. Britain still has about 50,000 pubs, but that’s only half the number there were in 1970. Reasons given for this sharp decline include periodic recessions when folk don’t have money to throw around, the price of drink which has increased every year since 1979, the smoking ban, and cheaper booze sold in all the supermarkets.

But, to me, the saddest cause of the mass closures is provided by a sociological survey which claimed that people are simply not as sociable as they used to be: they tend to get their drink in tins from the shop and take it home for while they’re watching the telly or going online.

I wish this decline could be reversed, for the English pub is an ancient institution, a big part of our whole way of life. According to Geoffrey Chaucer, the Tabard Inn in Southwark is where the medieval pilgrims stopped off on their way to Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury. The oldest pub in England is said to be The Porch House in Stow-on-the-Wold. I’m not going to get into Darlington rivalries, but the accolade for the oldest pub in town is contested between The Tawny Owl in Neasham Road and The Red Lion, not a million miles from the Echo offices in Priestgate.

And the pub is quintessentially English. The continentals and the Americans have their cafes and bars, but England rejoices in its alehouses. I still feel there’s something not quite right when I have a glass of wine in the pub, which is meant for beer-drinking. Pubs are for supping ale and talking. When I was at college in Liverpool, I learnt more in discussions at The Cambridge pub off Abercrombie Square than I ever gleaned in the lecture theatre. And when I was working in the City of London, I used to go and sit in The Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street, in the very room where Dr Johnson used to hold forth among friends such as Boswell, Edmund Burke and Joshua Reynolds.

The expression “public house” is itself a wonder: for while “public” denotes open and general, “house” is all about what’s individual and personal. To put the two together is to create a new sort of institution verging on the miraculous and the sublime. Pubs are where we can unashamedly air our prejudices. Here are mine: no musak, please, no gaming machines and no TV. There is a recent abomination called the gastro-pub. But the prefix “gastro” doesn’t go with “pub”; it goes with “enteritis”. The government could, and in my opinion should, do something to help the pub landlord and reverse the closures. VAT could be cut and the price of a pint reduced.

This would not be a subsidy, but an investment. For pubs are a significant part of our national infrastructure. The pub – like the market, the newspaper and the parish church – is a powerful engine driving local identity. That’s why it’s called the “local”. It promotes civil society and social cohesion: in a word, friendship. The pub adds greatly to the gaiety of the nation.

There was no more dedicated quaffer of ale than the great GK Chesterton who wrote:

“It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest

God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.”

My shout. Cheers!