Grandma’s perfect pub

As an emigrant from Scotland, I was taken aback by the weird foreignness of the south of England. Some of the south’s strangeness took a while to register — for example, just how crowded it was down here, and how very much warmer: it was my third summer in the south before it dawned on me that this wasn’t another freak heatwave. Then there were all the very obvious, immediate differences — the banknotes all being issued by the same bank, the way everyone talked and nobody could understand a word I said and, above all, the pubs.

Back home, my local had been one of those scary-looking Scottish places — a flat-roofed concrete bunker with frosted-glass windows, a public house that was distinguishable from a public convenience only by the large, neon T for Tennent’s sign, whose bar staff would rarely indulge in any backchat or bantz that would come between their customers’ half-and-halfs or pints of eighty shilling.