← Places in Oakhaven

Public house

The Slag & Slurry

Foundry End

The frontage of a corner pub, gold SLAG & SLURRY lettering above dark windows, lit by low evening sun.

A corner shop unit that became a pub and never looked back. Three floors of it, with an iron-bracket hanging sign outside that swings on the actual wind - and in a storm gets over to fourteen degrees, which is the sort of detail you only notice once and then cannot stop noticing.

Four house cask ales on the hand pumps: Oakhaven Best Bitter, Slurry Stout, Pit Pony Porter and Midland Mild. Twenty drinks on the menu altogether, two pounds fifteen to five twenty-five, and if you were daft enough to buy one of everything it would cost you seventy-eight ninety-five.

Charlotte keeps the bar and will not serve you out of turn, however long you stand there looking hopeful. Samantha sings from seven. Edward is in his chair from open until close and has eleven subjects he will talk to you about, in three different moods each, depending on how the day has gone.

In the corner by the window there is a fruit machine, and it has a name: ACORN FORTUNE, built by Pennine Amusements Ltd of Radworth, category C, serial PA-FM01-2514. A pound a go, a hundred pounds at the top of it, three reels of sixteen stops turning behind the glass. From little acorns, says the backglass, which is either encouragement or a warning depending on the evening you are having.

A British fruit machine standing in the corner of a pub: a tall dark cabinet with a lit red backglass reading ACORN FORTUNE, three reels behind glass, a row of coloured trail panels and a red button deck, against heraldic blue and gold wallpaper.
ACORN FORTUNE, in the corner by the window. Pennine Amusements of Radworth, and the only thing in the room that is pleased to see you.

Ten symbols, oak leaf at the bottom and a golden oak at the top, and the paytable is printed across the backglass where you can read it before you commit: three in a line pays two pounds at the least and the jackpot at the most. A nudge board runs up the right of the reel window. Under it, a twelve-cell trail - a pound, nudges, two pounds, hi-lo, three, LOSE sitting square in the middle where you would least like it, five, repeat, ten, holds, twenty, and the jackpot on the last cell. Seven buttons across the deck, lit from underneath.

Close on the machine's face: the ACORN FORTUNE backglass with its paytable, the three-reel window, the NUDGE board beside it, the twelve-cell trail below and the lit buttons across the deck.
The whole argument, printed where you can read it: three in a line pays, the trail, and seven buttons that are all, in the end, the same button.

Over a long enough evening it gives back about eighty pence in the pound, and it keeps count. That is the honest number for a machine of this sort and it is not a secret; it is on the machine. Edward will tell you the same thing from his chair, at greater length, and without being asked.

The gents is fifty-three metres from the bar through the upstairs corridors, and there are exactly two signs to help you. The cellar holds twelve fifty-kilo kegs, and you can carry them.

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