HEARING of yet another ailing York local up for sale as part of the ongoing meltdown of the licensed trade, I was suddenly struck by a major factor behind the imminent extinction of the great British pub.

Forget cut-price supermarket booze, rapacious owners forever pushing up licensees’ rents or even the smoking ban; I’m talking about the demise of the bar-room bore.

Now, many of us like to express our opinions a bit more strongly than normal when under the influence of mood-altering substances (a large cup of coffee suffices in my case), so it’s hardly a surprise that a venue specifically intended for imbibing strong beverages produces debates which go off in directions that might be avoided in more sober company.

There’s also the curious character who never seems to sup more than half a pint, but still gets his kicks from telling anyone who’ll listen his theories on what is wrong with the world and how, if only he was put in charge for a short time, he’d sort it all out.

Getting stuck with the latter is a traditional night-out nightmare, while I recall a colleague who got so animated in a busy central York pub one night after a few strong lagers he literally cleared our third of the bar, with full pints left behind by fleeing punters so unnerved by his increasingly agitated conversation.

Neither may seem adverts for the pub trade, but at least these people were filling the bars and the landlords’ bank accounts. However, I fear they have now deserted their traditional watering holes for virtual pastures new. Yep, the pub bore is alive and well, and on the internet.

Think about it. Once upon a time, if you believed, for example, that far from being a deluded, self-pitying menace to society, Raoul Moat was actually a bit of a legend and thoroughly justified in his attitude toward the police (and social services, etc), and you wanted to share your views with the world, you simply went down the pub and had a good old rant there to anyone who would listen.

With any luck you would avoid getting in a fight, and by the next day everyone would forget about the perhaps rather “challenging” views you’d been spouting.

Now, however, the overly opinionated don’t need to haunt the public bar in order to find an outlet for their gifts to the world.

All they need is a computer and an internet connection and they’re away, in some cases no doubt aided by the aforementioned cut-price supermarket booze, or possibly something even more mind-bending.

Of course, many views expressed on the internet are perceptive, witty and perfectly valid, as were many pub conversations when we still had pubs. But some are so “challenging” as to be more than offensive, and I don’t defend them. My point is that internet rants are, if anything, more ephemeral than pub chat, or possibly even a newspaper column. Every now and then you get something like the now notorious Moat Facebook site, which so outraged our dear Prime Minister and caused a debate on whether we should attach more importance to freedom of speech or the upset caused by pushing the boundaries too far.

But what’s new here isn’t the fact people are publicly expressing arguably outrageous views but the way they’re doing it, and I wonder if thousands of pub bores across the country didn’t spread those views at least as effectively as the web.

So maybe we shouldn’t assume civilisation is on the verge of collapse if people use cyberspace to express opinions that seem beyond the pale; it’s been going on in other arenas for many decades. It’s not that difficult to spot, and avoid, the web bore and the internet rant, so maybe we should just be thankful we don’t actually have to listen to them any more.