Three "Cheers" to Dry-Bars. I will drink coffee to that!

I have a tough time finding "man" friends primarily because most of the fraternizing is over sports or alcohol or both, and I couldn't care for either one of them.  A couple of weeks ago, I was excited that I finally had a "man date" when I had coffee with an old friend.

Once, I met a guy at a get together and I was sure I could become friends with him. In a way, a female friend even became an intermediary and she emailed me about this "boy friend."  I tell ya, life gets difficult for a straight guy who does not drink or smoke or watch ball games to hang with the guys!  Not that I am complaining about having to interact with women most of the time!

Another fellow-blogger-friend--ahem, a female--had also commented about this issue.

Hubby and I don't drink (alcoholic beverages). We get many invites for socializing over alcohol, and we have to politely decline. The husband suffers more than me, as he does not get to hang out with most of the guy gang. But he really hates drinking (even socially), and refuses to put up with socialization centered around drinking.

Yep, there is something about hanging out with the guys that I miss.  But, "happy hour" is no draw for me. I am happy at different hours, I suppose, and via very different drinks. Which is why it is such a pleasure to know that there is an interesting development that could make people like me and the blogger-friend and her husband all pumped up--"dry bars":

Unlike many cafés, they stay open late. They emulate bars in other ways, with live music, comedy acts and films to pull in punters. When the lights go down and the DJ plays at Sobar, which opened in Nottingham in January, it looks like any city bar, hopes Alex Gillmore, the manager. Redemption misses the hefty profits made on alcohol, but temperance brings its own benefits. Business remains steady throughout the week rather than spiking at the weekend, says Catherine Salway, its founder. The absence of drunken, obstreperous patrons means that bouncers are unnecessary.

A bar that is not really a bar, but a place where everybody knows your name.  About time, I would think.

Now, do not confuse the coffee serving dry-bars with the likes of Starbucks that serve coffee (for the record: I don't care for the charcoal-like coffee beans that Starbucks uses!)  The dry-bars will have everything that one would expect in a pub--except the alcohol.

In this age of beer and bikini commercials, and high, highfalutin talk about the terroir of wine, we teetotalers are utter misfits. But, hey, if not for coffee shops--not alcohol serving pubs--the intellectual and social revolution might never have happened.

The coffee-houses that sprang up across Europe, starting around 1650, functioned as information exchanges for writers, politicians, businessmen and scientists. Like today's websites, weblogs and discussion boards, coffee-houses were lively and often unreliable sources of information that typically specialised in a particular topic or political viewpoint. They were outlets for a stream of newsletters, pamphlets, advertising free-sheets and broadsides. Depending on the interests of their customers, some coffee-houses displayed commodity prices, share prices and shipping lists, whereas others provided foreign newsletters filled with coffee-house gossip from abroad.

 And, here is an example of what went on in those old coffee shops:

Dark rumours of plots and counter-plots swirled in London's coffee-houses, but they were also centres of informed political debate. Swift remarked that he was “not yet convinced that any Access to men in Power gives a man more Truth or Light than the Politicks of a Coffee House.” Miles's coffee-house was the meeting-place of a discussion group, founded in 1659 and known as the Amateur Parliament. Pepys observed that its debates were “the most ingeniose, and smart, that I ever heard, or expect to heare, and bandied with great eagernesse; the arguments in the Parliament howse were but flatte to it.” After debates, he noted, the group would hold a vote using a “wooden oracle”, or ballot-box—a novelty at the time.

Yep. You, the reader, and I would not be here enjoying the democracy with a market economy if it were not for those coffee shops that couldn't care for alcohol.

While thanking the drink--coffee, that is--help me with the quest, you know, to begin to right the balance that is now heavily weighed down by female friends ;)