The Alibi bar in Altrincham, Cheshire, caused a hoo-ha last week by banning single entrants after 9 p.m. The landlord, Carl Peters, explained: ‘Sometimes, if you let people in on their own, the reason why they’re on their own is that they’ve got no one to talk to, so they start mithering other groups.’
Mithering is a familiar word in the north-west. Mrs Gaskell, who was brought up in Knutsford, nine miles from Altrincham, used it in Mary Barton (1848): ‘Don’t mither your mammy for bread.’
Mr Peters had other things on his mind, too. His quite chatty sign on dress code specifies: ‘No sportswear/trackies. No Stone Island. No ripped/frayed jeans. No baseball caps. No roadman vibes.’ I asked my husband whether any of these items would be acceptable in his club. He was certain they wouldn’t be, though he was unsure about ‘roadman vibes’.
‘Isn’t there a roadman in The Thirty-Nine Steps?’ he asked. There is indeed. Richard Hannay, in his exciting chase across Scotland, changes clothes with one to evade pursuers. That roadman’s task was breaking up stones to mend the road, like the weary subject of Henry Wallis’s picture ‘The Stonebreaker’. Neither character would have been turned away from a public bar in their day. But today’s roadman vibe is about what was identified by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2009 as an urban culture ‘originating among young, black, working-class people, often associated with street culture, music, and fashion, and typically characterised as tough, combative and streetwise; specifically a gang member involved in drug-dealing or other criminal activities’. A decade earlier road came to notice as a word for areas of a town with hangers-about of a tough attitude, associated with grime and drill music, and streetwear. Some of the streetwear is quite expensive. Not my scene. Though I’m not sure that Alibi, with its karaoke rooms, is quite, either.
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