02/10/2026
Hi everyone 😊 A little note from me, the landlady.
A lot of you will have noticed that I’ve stepped back from The George over the last few months, and I wanted to explain why, because I would hate anyone to think that stepping back meant I had stopped caring and we all know rumours in this village are rife.
Some of you know me pretty well by now. I’m sarcastic, I like to think I’m funny, I almost certainly like dogs more than I like people, and I think most people would describe me as pretty confident.
What you might not know is that underneath all of that, I am ridiculously oversensitive. I obsess over things. I hate conflict. I overthink absolutely everything and, probably worst of all, I am a desperate people pleaser.
Not a particularly useful combination of personality traits when you run a pub. 😂
I love The George. I love running it. I love the people I’ve met through it, the friends I’ve made, the regulars who have become part of our lives, and this slightly ridiculous old building that has consumed such an enormous part of mine.
But the truth is that, behind the scenes, I haven’t been very well. Over the last year my anxiety became increasingly difficult to manage. I stopped sleeping properly. I started having panic attacks. Eventually I reached a point where I simply couldn’t keep pretending I was fine. I went to my doctor, started treatment and, for a while, I needed to step away from being the face of the pub and concentrate on getting myself better.
But I think there’s an important distinction that you don’t realise. I stepped out of sight. I didn’t step away.
You might not have seen my face behind the bar very often, but I can assure you I’ve still been here. The rotas, the wages, the ordering, the stock control, the invoices, the bookings, the rooms, the suppliers, the pricing, the menus, the endless spreadsheets, the staff messages, the complaints, the emails, the paperwork, the social media I haven’t been posting on 😂, the ideas for what we do next and approximately four million other tiny things that apparently have to happen for a pub to open its doors every morning.
That’s me.
I’ve been doing all of that from slightly further behind the scenes because, for a while, that was what I needed to do to keep both myself and The George going.
There wasn’t one single cause for what happened to me, but one of the things I found increasingly difficult was the negativity that seems to have crept into the way we speak to each other online.
You may have noticed that The George hasn’t posted very much recently. There’s a reason for that too.
Sometimes I’d post a photograph of something we were proud of and, instead of simply scrolling past if it wasn’t somebody’s cup of tea, there would be comments about the portion being too small, the food looking awful, somebody not liking burgers, or whatever else it happened to be that day.
Individually, they’re just silly Facebook comments. But behind the business page was a real person reading every single one of them.
Me.
And because of those less-visible parts of my personality, I didn’t shrug them off, I took them home. I’d read them again. I’d wonder whether they were right. I’d worry about what everyone else thought. I’d convince myself that everybody agreed with them. I convinced myself they hate me.
And gradually I started feeling as though I couldn’t do anything right, that I wasn’t running the pub well enough. I wasn’t being a good enough mum. My house was a mess. I wasn’t keeping on top of anything. I felt as though I was failing at absolutely everything.
Eventually, I crumbled, but I’m not writing this for sympathy and I certainly don’t want anyone feeling they need to tiptoe around me. I’m writing it because I think sometimes we forget that there are actual human beings behind businesses and pages. The old rule of “if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” probably deserves a bit of a comeback.
And, more importantly, I want to say this:
I’m still here, And I never stopped caring about The George. I desperately want this pub to survive.
Everything we’re doing at the moment is about trying to give it the best possible chance of doing exactly that. The planning application for the garden isn’t about turning The George into something it isn’t. It’s about making it sustainable and making it better.
I’m bringing in new staff. We’re giving parts of the pub a little makeover. We’re planting things. We’re changing things. We’re trying new ideas. We’re listening. We’re trying to breathe some life back into this beautiful old place.
Some of it will work. Some of it probably won’t. We won’t get everything right. But bloody hell, we’re trying.
So I suppose this is me asking for something too.
If you haven’t been to The George for a while, come and see us again. Have a pint. Have some dinner. Bring your family. Sit by the fire. Tell us what you love. Tell us, kindly and constructively, what we could do better. I had a great chat with a great man this morning and he did just that, and I’m going to fix those things that he said.
Give us another chance.
Because pubs like The George don’t survive simply because they’ve been standing for hundreds of years.
They survive because people use them.
I love The George. I care enormously about what happens to it. And despite disappearing into the background for a little while, I’m still here, still fighting for it and still determined to give it everything I can.
And finally, I’m going to admit something that probably demonstrates just how far outside my comfort zone this post is: I’m physically shaking writing it. I don’t talk about this stuff. I don’t like people seeing me vulnerable and every instinct I have is currently screaming at me to delete this and post a picture of a dog instead. 😂
I’m also not going to read the comments. That’s not because I don’t care what anybody has to say. It’s because one of the things I’ve finally learnt is that sometimes looking after myself means knowing when not to look.
So I’m going to press post, put my phone down, walk a dog, and resist the overwhelming urge to delete the whole thing.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us, checked in on me, defended us, drank with us, eaten with us, laughed with us and stuck with us.
You have absolutely no idea how much it means.
Ali ❤️
