"This place ain't so bad at all"

Dec 16 2006 by Mike Chapple, Liverpool Daily Post

THE Pub Column went to see a new feature film last week.
 
There were high hopes that it wouldn't be just one more movie about a Liverpool bursting with drugs, gangsters, washed-up could-have-been-contenders, chip-on-the-shoulder scalls and a run-down city bar culture policed by drive-by shootings and "you're dead, mate" ambassadors on dead end streets.
 
But it was.
 
Yes, we know that sober Rebeccas from Sunnybrook Farm don't skip down Seel Street after Saturday midnight, dispensing flowers from wicker baskets with cheesy grins and a "hail fellow well met" attitude.
 
Precisely the opposite, and that's why the Pub Column regularly avoids tripping into the city's clubland for a drink at particular times.
 
But for Gawd's sake this place ain't so bad at all, and over the years this old lag has felt far more uncomfortable on the mean streets of so-called genteel places elsewhere.
 
Which made the cinematic experience all the more depressing by what was to follow.
 
We - that is the Echo's ale guru Paddy Shennan and yours truly - had hopped on a Virgin (train, that is) gleefully escaping Castle Greyskull for an evening of gratuitous glugging at the annual bash of the esteemed British Guild of Beer Writers in London, (pictured above).
 
We'll bypass an elongated description of the inevitable (ie, line failure, train termination at Rugby, more rail misery, blah-dee-flippin'-blah) and fast forward a few hectic hours to finally sitting down for the awards dinner at the swish Millennium Gloucester Hotel, in Kensington.