FOOD shopping in Port Seton last Saturday lunchtime, it was a surprise to see The Seaglass Inn clearly open for business, doing brisk business, operating a takeaway beer service from its porch, attracting a sizable crowd of drinkers brazenly consuming beer, gathering on the pavement parallel to bustling Links Road.

A busy parade of customers from nearby shops – including a paper shop and butcher’s – were, like me, doing essential food shopping yet many were elderly and had to squeeze perilously past boisterous drinkers outside the public house.

Sitting in my car, watching with disbelief for 15 minutes, I felt for the many elderly folk forced to step onto the road – a road safety /coronavirus double jeopardy – to avoid increasingly boisterous and potentially Covid-19-infected drinkers, 2m social distancing clearly conveniently forgotten.

With other pubs in East Lothian adhering to Scottish Government rules, I do wonder what commercial or social imperative The Seaglass licensees consider they enjoy and can be used to justify over and above other public houses in the county, some of whom could now be encouraged to follow suit.

Potentially, for drinkers, a couple of pints in exchange for infecting each other or innocent pedestrians; for the licensee, some money in return for compromising the health and wellbeing of already vulnerable and compromised elderly shoppers, not to mention themselves, their staff and customers.

Over recent months, I’ve seen several incidences of domestic breaches of lockdown rules – including a close neighbour hosting a BBQ in her garden for a dozen or so family / friends – but I’m no vigilante or busybody, preferring to hope that individuals voluntarily do their best to follow the rules, keeping themselves and others as safe as possible in precarious times.

But for a publican to either flout – or bend – the rules, for commercial gain, creating a potential virus and road safety hotspot on a busy public thoroughfare to the benefit of nobody but themselves, whilst risking the health and wellbeing of others in the vicinity, takes irresponsibility to a different level.

I went back on Sunday to see if Saturday might have been a one-off but it clearly wasn’t – as this image shows – but the crowd was approximately half of what it was on Saturday afternoon.

Such selfish, reckless and morally unacceptable behaviour – quite possibly also illegal – flies in the face of the public interest, hence I would suggest the local constabulary call by The Seaglass for a quiet word – no more – in the licensee’s ear to, as we say here in Scotland, ‘screw the nut’.

Name and address supplied

Christine O’Brien, licensee of The Seaglass Inn, said in response to the comments: “Pubs in Scotland are allowed to offer a takeaway service during lockdown. The Seaglass Inn has not done so, with the exception of last weekend, when we sold takeaway beer in aid of the Port Seton Community Council resilience team, which is providing food and other essential support to those in need in the community during the Covid-19 crisis. It’s an extremely valuable cause and one we wanted to back. The beer was sold in closed containers from a table at the entrance to the pub and customers were asked to move on once they had made their purchase. Two metre marks were put down on the pavement to help people queue at the appropriate distance and those serving wore masks and gloves and undertook regular cleaning and sanitisation of the table. The pub made no money from this fundraiser; all proceeds are being donated to the resilience team. More than £500 has been raised. We saw no boisterous behaviour from those who attended, so it is disappointing to hear these allegations to the contrary.”