The Slowest and Longest Pub Crawl

'THE SLOWEST AND LONGEST PUB CRAWL'

I first noticed it in Amsterdam. We’d left an Italian restaurant and headed for the nearest pub, maybe called O’Connell’s. Inside a Croatian band were playing, while a Polish barmaid served English drinkers, but the walls spelled out what kind of place it truly was.

‘Do you think this is a genuine Irish pub?’ I asked.

‘It certainly looks like one. Is that a shillelagh over the fireplace?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘I’m impressed by the pictures, though. Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce. You can’t get more Irish than this. This must be what every pub in Ireland looks like.’

‘We could almost be in, I don’t know, Wexford, couldn’t we?’

I raised a heavy glass of super-chilled Hoegaarden, as tourists asked loudly in
English for directions to the nearest cafe.

Cut to a couple of years in the future and I’m walking around the Place de la Revolution. Either Paris is too snobbish or I’m too vulgar, but nowhere will agree to sell me Pernod avec limonade. It pains them even to be asked. But just around the corner here is somewhere unpretentious, earthy even. Declan Donnelly’s, I think it was. A glance through authentically dusty windows reveals portraits of, I suppose, Yeats, Beckett. Comfortably nondescript inside, welcoming in a strangely familiar way on this dreary afternoon. Closed for now. Maybe I’ll come back later.

Skip further forward, and now it’s Chinatown, awed gently from a day’s wandering and the spectacle of Brooklyn Bridge, and looking for the next bar. This route takes me into, call it Seamus O’Murphy’s, real New York Irish. Inside all harps, shamrocks, Celtic script and full-bodied NY accents. Brendan Behan, J M Synge... Fiddle-heavy music of dubious validity on the jukebox.


‘My great-grandfather always used to tell me stories of the old country,’ from the barman flirting with the girl sitting at the next stool along.

‘I have always so wanted to go there,’ she flirts back.

The kind of place where an English accent sounds especially English.

‘If I were someone like Tony Hawks I could write a book about this,’ I say later on, in some gastropub of no fixed nationality. ‘Travel to Irish pubs around the world – Namibia, Bhutan – and see how different cultures fake the Irish experience. Why do they do it? What is it they’re searching for? Show how they look for the essence of it, and maybe through doing so find it. Something. See how we can all learn from each other in a spirit of self-deprecation. I could cast a wry glance at the antics of foreigners while illustrating how we’re really all the same. It could be quirky but humane.’

‘The problem is,’ comes the reply, ‘you’re not really Irish.’

‘We can work around that. It could be the irony at the heart of the gimmick, or something.’

‘Sure.’

But it is an idea conceived in a pub, and everyone knows one must never knock those.