But banning children, it turns out, wasn’t enough. Having made his position perfectly clear to anyone who’d tried to bring a small person in for a quiet half, the landlord apparently felt the need to take the argument further — to Metro, Sky News, to Instagram, to anyone who’d listen — to explain that the real issue wasn’t the ban itself, but the entitled, feckless, supervision-averse parents who had made it necessary. Parents are, it seems, a people who have mistaken a Hackney pub for a crèche, who lack the basic understanding that children require watching in public spaces, and who have — through our collective negligence — stressed out the dogs.
