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How long? You're joking

Victoria Coren
Sunday 18 November 2007
The Observer

This week, for better or worse, we are all closer to France. (Apart from those of you who were in France last week and have just got back.) The new high-speed Eurostar has been launched from St Pancras station in London, so the land of snails and mild scorn is now only 135 minutes away, while St Pancras has enjoyed an £800m refit. The big new attraction of the revamped station is, as proudly boasted in all the newspapers last week, 'Europe's longest champagne bar'.

Let's just think about that for a minute. Europe's longest champagne bar. Why are we boasting about this?

It isn't Europe's most glamorous champagne bar, nor its oldest, nor most prettily lit. It is not the champagne bar with the widest selection of wines, the comfiest chairs or the nicest people.

But it's got length. Longest in Europe. What a completely arbitrary quality, like introducing Jamaica's widest poem. It solves a problem that didn't exist. Philip Marlowe never complained that although the drinks were cold, the barman cool and the chick hot, the bar itself was too goddamn stubby.

I have racked my brains, trying to imagine the advantages of a particularly extended bar. If you had a row with the person who was taking you to Paris, you could both have a drink without any awkward eye contact. But that would surely be cancelled out by how difficult it must be to catch the eye of the bar staff? If you are the kind of person who, like me, tends to stand there for ages, awkwardly clutching a fiver, clearing her throat ineffectively as more confident types barge past to order a round for 12 people, you would probably miss the train. This bar is 95 metres long; you may miss Christmas.

And what this proves is that although 13 years have passed since a direct tunnel to Paris first opened, we have learnt absolutely nothing from them. In France, they boast about the fact that Eugene Ionesco used to drink in that bar or Cezanne scribbled on the napkins in that one; they write the names of their best wines on a blackboard outside; they hire waitresses who look like supermodels. They do not put blue plaques up to advertise the fact that it would take ages to walk to the loo.

We have to assume, by the way, that Europe's longest champagne bar is not intended to be a destination in itself. Nobody can have anticipated conversations along the lines of:

'Darling, we're going on a fabulous date this weekend. I'm going to mark our anniversary in style.'

'A meal at Gordon Ramsay's? A 17th- century tavern in the Yorkshire Dales? Tango dancing under the stars?'

'No - we'll be getting pissed at St Pancras.'

Unlikely. You just don't go out drinking in a railway station. This feat of architectural magnificence can only have been designed to welcome European travellers; it is our new Opening Statement About Britain.

'Hello,' we are saying. 'Welcome to the land of Shakespeare and Milton, of Tudor kings and ancient palaces, of rolling hills and fallow deer, or, as we prefer to pitch it in 2007, of bloody long bars.'

And not just bloody long bars, but bloody long bars serving a drink made in France. A little craven, no? I don't leap on to the platform of the Gare du Nord expecting an immediate ploughman's lunch.

At first, I thought they should have built a giant teashop instead. A quadrangle of armchairs, a fleet of silver teapots and a battery of warm scones served by an army of Joyce Grenfells: that would spell English railway station, all right. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard did not fall in love over a jeroboam of Krug. Flutes of Dom Perignon might oil the wheels between a mobile phone billionaire and his mail-order Russian supermodel, but they tend to arrive by plane.

And then I realised that the beauty of the whole business had been staring me in the face all along. It is the very pointlessness of having Europe's longest bar which is our national statement. The drink might be French and the vibe might be Russian, but the misplaced pride and the randomness of the statistic is utterly British.

Tourists will hop off the Eurostar and say: 'But vy are zey boasting about being longest bar? Eez not anything to be.'

That will be their first vision of a land where people give each other The Guinness Book of Records for Christmas; where men remember football scores for decades afterwards; where Nick Hornby can write bestselling novels about making lists; where people alphabetise their record collections, drink yards of ale and raise money for charity by bathing in the world's biggest vat of beans. Why measure the length of a champagne bar? Why not? Welcome to Britain.

And now I can see that all our aspirations are actually reflected in this bar: small, daft, pointless, but pride-filled anyway. It's about the ambition, not the achievement; we can be proud that it was done, even though it wasn't really worth doing.

The silliness makes it perfect for us. It's like the Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park, which, with its confused construction, cracks and leaks, pays far greater tribute to Diana than anything flawless could possibly have done.

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