A Country For Old Men

William McIlvanney (in Surviving the Shipwreck) recounts the following:

“It’s just after 11:30 on a dull weekday morning. Mick Murphy, alias Beef, alias several other people he claims to be, stands at the bar contemplating the remaining two-thirds of his pint of McEwan’s. Already pushing 70, Mick has good reason to regret the way age arranges its remorseless ambushes. His gammy leg is giving him severe trouble and he’s due in Kilmarnock Infirmary at noon. The possibility of amputation makes it seem like High Noon. What remains for a man in the bleakness of such moments? Mick finds it. He glances at the clock and says to the manager, ‘Joe, keep yer eye on that pint. Ah’m goin’ up tae get ma leg aff.”

I don’t know Mick Murphy (or rather I didn’t, since he eventually “died a two-legged death,” which - and maybe it's just me - would seem to undermine somewhat the anecdote above) but I know the pub McIlvanney eulogizes as “the resort of people with the true grain of character still showing through them in a time of plastic personalities,” and not only didn’t think much of it but couldn't stand the place. This might have been something of a first at the time but, having by now been many times around that particular block, I have come across many pubs I didn’t like, well hidden as they were among the many more I did like.

McIlvanney admits it doesn’t look much, having been “by-passed by the recent juggernaut of bad taste that has hit so many pubs and moved on,” notes that “the most significant furnishings are people,” and presents a few cameos to illustrate the point: the man who talks to the water-bottle; the “incomprehensibility in stereo” of Jimmy and Danny; the electrician who is writing the life of Cervantes; and the brickie who quotes from the updated Scottish version of Candide that he is writing. And, well, that's about it, apart from Mabel, who works at the bar and doubles as a bouncer, and the stranger who thinks he's Henry VIII ("I had terrible trouble with that Ann Boleyn").

He could go on, “but if you don’t get the picture by now, you never will, at least not from me.” The picture “is that this is how a pub can sometimes be, not a plastic factory for liquefying money but a place where people can prospect casual conversation for mutual nuggets of unexpected gold, explore small dreams, admit who they are or pretend to be who they’re not and know it won’t be used against them.”

As I say, I know the G________ (at the foot of B______ Street, near the J _____ Bridge, as the old Russians might have put it). And I’ve had a drink or two – enjoyable enough – with several of the people mentioned above. I didn’t mind drinking there, but it really is a watering hole of last resort. It’s the last pub in the town you grew up in, the town you left and only occasionally forget that you couldn’t wait to escape, and by last pub I don't mean the last pub standing but the last one you would go into.

This is not to knock McIlvanney’s estimate of the place (which might well be different, for various reasons, were he not writing a book that sells in stores around the corner from it). I appreciate the anecdotes, “the benign eccentricity of many people … gathered over the years into an unofficial history of ordinary lives.” But imagine the bleakness (as you come in soaked through with the rain and cold to the bone) of a pub with no fire, no gantry, no covered bulbs, no actual wood, no actual air, no larger a crowd on Saturday night than on Tuesday morning, and, save for Mabel, no women. It’s not that bleak, of course: it’s much bleaker.

I would guess that McIlvanney is letting his nostalgia talk here. And my own nostalgia is stirred elsewhere. So, keep yer eye on that pint. Ah’m away up tae get ma heid aff.