Drinking Alone Ends Positively
I called into the Menagerie, my local of sorts, a Wednesday or two ago and it was pretty dead, just me and the barman. You might think that’s rubbish but I love when the perfect storm of an empty bar and friendly barman come together as you can really just kick back and have a nice chat. A nice chat where one of you gets really steaming and then wakes up with a boiled cabbage for a head the next day.
Before I bid him adieu that evening though we were talking about my work and I just so happened (really) to have a load of photocopied doodles that I’d done that day in my bag. The idea with the photocopies was to go into bars around belfast and blue tack the pictures inside toilet cubicles for people to happen upon. It seemed like a really good idea at the time. Aside from that I found out that it’s very easy for me to get sidetracked once inside the bar and so promptly forgot my mission up until this point.
I dutifully pulled one of these pictures out of my bag when asked and showed my imbibing enabler and then, rather wonderfully, he offered to put it up behind the bar.
So it’s there now, in one of my favourite bars of all time. You’ll have to go down there to see it as I haven’t got it digitally. It may seem like a silly thing to be excited about but for the whole time I’ve been going to pubs I always loved seeing what the employees there had stuck up on their walls in their domain - sometimes it’s pictures of them on a work night out, other times it’s funny newspaper clippings reappropriated to be about a staff member. It’s a little shrine back there and I was always jealous of not being able to take part (having never worked in a bar). So for me this was a small victory, do you see?
Oh, you’ll never understand me will you! Have a sample of something I’m working on at the moment and probably shouldn’t show you because it’s A GREAT SECRET
