The Crown and Thistle (Morrells)
Old Road, Quarry, Oxford

Monday to Saturday 11am to 11pm
Sunday 12pm to 3pm, 7pm to 10.30pm (12.ix.1998)

Morrells Oxford Bitter £1.87 (12.ix.1998)

Comes in two halves, is carpeted, and has a fantastic, big Time bell. I 
think you can ring for service if the staff are in the other half on it. I 
tried this the second time I came, only to discover the barman standing 
behind me tidying the ashtrays. Whoops.

When I was there on a Saturday night in May 1997, they were playing a tape 
loop which had rather a lot of Madness and Elvis Costello on it. There was 
also a very quiet, anoraked, slightly malodorous man with a 
hammer-blackened fingernail sitting at a table. Every so often he would 
walk up to the bar and ask for a glass of water. The barman would say "I 
don't make my living selling glasses of water" and the strange man would 
return to his seat.

The next time I came, in September 1998, the lounge bar had children 
called Charlotte swarming round the video games, while the public bar had 
all of the customers squeezed into one end while a man with a keyboard and 
a microphone sang "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do". It's enough to make you 
long for Neil Sedaka it is. Should have been warned when, approaching it 
from the Shotover end of Old Road, we saw a huge cross of St George 
painted on the side, annotated gules with "It's coming home". Don't know 
how it squares with the title of the pub, or the small collection of 
Scottish paraphernalia they have in the lounge bar. They were out of 
Varsity that time, but they normally do it.

The other weird thing about this place is that the decor is mostly the 
sort of mirrors you find in pubs, advertising some sort of defunct drink 
or other. There's a really odd one above the bar in the Lounge, in the 
shape of a loaf of bread cross section. (12.ix.1998)

James Davey says:
THEY'VE GOT NO LOO ROLL. (12.ix.1998)