For the love of dodgy boozers by a dodgy boozer

When I was serving in purgatory (also known as Linton Military Camp) I somehow found my way on to the committee of the Linton Soldier's Club, ending up as president of the mess committee for about two years. Each military camp has one and they are almost all uniformly identical. There will be linoleum because it is easy to hose down, there are bar leaners, a couple of well-cared for and well-used pool tables and a bar with a grill so that it can close peacefully at the end of the night when the Orderly Officer and Orderly Sergeant come to throw everyone out. Being so far from home, I spent a lot of time in that bar. I saw a lot of it at opening time and a lot of it at closing time. I played thousands of games of pool, consumed more beer and cigarettes* than is good for a person and when I look back, it is with a thing called nostalgie a la boue. 

Marty, Shaun and Tim demonstrate another
use for duct tape: customer control.

Nostalgie a la boue literally means nostalgia of mud and is the French term for the fond recollection of a misspent past of seedy bars and bad behaviour. There's something about a dodgy bar that I quite like from tacky memorabilia on the walls to the beer stained carpet on the floor. If a dodgy pub could talk, it would have more stories to tell than the bible. I'm looking back a little fondly because I was walking through the centre of Christchurch the other day. Most of my old haunts are now Wilson's Carparks and I cannot help but be saddened when I think of the happy hours spent idly leaning on the bar at The Bog Irish Bar in the pleasant and most excellent company of the bar staff and regulars. There would be the occasional shenanigans where there might be a scrap or someone would fall drunkenly face-first into the fire, but mostly it was a place of great humour, such as the attached photo of one of the bar staff's flatmates who was getting a bit lippy so we duct taped him to the banister on the stage and left him there to stew all night. I look at that stage and remember on occasion where I set a World, Commonwealth and Olympic record for consumption of Guinness while presenting a pub quiz. I won't say how much it was, but it ironically rhymes with 'plenty'. My rendition of the second half of the quiz was in Swedish and it finished about two hours after its scheduled conclusion. I was also fired and then rehired a year later when I had done some penitence, to be fair, Orla was very nice about it.

Here's to The Bog and everyone in it.
And to the Linton Baggies, the Cheviot Trust
and the Excelsior Sports Bar

Most men have some story of pub-based buffonery that they ought to be ashamed of: some experience that seemed funny at the time but in the sober light of day gets filed under 'the accumulation of wisdom' cross-referenced with 'I'm never doing that again'. Any verbal recollection of those sorts of stories gets a reprimand from Atilla the Wife but I get a strange feeling of warmth from them. I think it is a part of having a life lived and while Atilla considers the time and money spent 'pissing against a wall', I think it has some value. To quote Vivian Stanshall "I spent all of my money on drink, carousing and women and the rest I wasted."

*I no longer smoke of course. Disreputable habit, a bit like getting plastered and singing "You're just too good to be true" to passing policemen. Yeah, I don't do that anymore either.