Good morning. It's three minutes after ten and you are listening to James O'Brien on LBC.

I've done it again. I haven't forgotten to bring any notes into the studio.

If you were listening, what was it, Friday of last week?

That I managed to sit down with just several blank sheets of paper in front of me.

But I've just remembered as I sat down why I wanted to talk about pubs today.

Oddly, it wasn't the newspapers which focus on pubs. Finally, it would seem that I don't like

the phrase mainstream media. I never know what it means. Mainstream media seems to be a phrase

deployed largely by people who prefer to make up their own stories or at least prefer to trust their uncle Keith's Facebook page,

or the mad imaginings of Donald Trump, rather than at least a sort of vague resemblance to observable

reality. So we'll just say, like, you know, the media. Big media. Legacy media. They seem to

finally be waking up to several things that we've been talking about on this program

for what feels like weeks, if not months.

Do you remember the day that someone first, or we first stumbled across warm banks?

And I suggested to you that this was something that was apparently on the horizon.

And we were both a bit skeptical, I think, weren't we?

A little bit sort of, well, all right.

You know, I think they might be talking about it in Bristol, Council, or somewhere like that.

And I mean, we've always, but actually officially, in this country, in 2022,

officially having policies designed to create spaces,

public spaces where people who can't afford to heat their own homes

could go for a little injection of temporary warmth.

Well, the Times newspaper, Rupert Murdoch's Times newspaper,

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