Glasgow Pubs

Pubs in Glasgow back in the black and white days were not welcoming places at all. Far from it. They were bastions of drink, little pill-boxes that stood beneath and below dark tenements. They were ill-lit and functional offering the meagrest of chairs and tables covered with a cold laminate on which lay several bunneted heads that had partaken of too much of the fruitily fortified wine. One of these sodden souls may or may not have been the barman!

The drinks were as dark as the countenances of the punters (only in Glasgow would a drink be named ‘heavy’). Ordinary conversations sounded like declarations of all-out war and there would have been tangible testosterone had the lives of these men not been blighted by one thing or the other: possibly both. They had a love-hate relationship with brother booze; they loved it at the time and hated it afterwards when they woke up in rainy doorways the week’s pay pissed down the leg of their trousers.

Where were the women? you  may reasonably ask as they do after all constitute the good half of the metropolitan population. Well, some of them are emulating their husband in a small snug nearby (or ‘slum’ if you’re of the Irish persuasion) and the rest are all stuck at home awaiting the return of ‘himself’ and his beery vapours unsure whether they’ll be offered the back of the hand or amorous fumblings before the snoring ensues. It would be some years yet until women would be awarded the social distinction of getting seriously wasted among their men folk. But, boy…when they were!

I saw two ‘ladies’ fighting outside Sammy Dow’s on the Kilmarnock Road out at Shawlands and it was seminal in my young life. The eroticism of skirts raised and be-stockinged legs akimbo as they brawled in the street, hair being tugged and docker’s oaths turning the blue air bluer. Two blousy Elsie Tanner’s going at it over some dark-chinned man who can’t even be bothered to raise himself from his barstool to witness what he’s caused.

Saturday night entertainment and better than the telly!