As I walk into the hotel bar my spirit sags.
No barstools.
Oh bloody hell.
Bang goes another one.
That’s my plans for the evening scuppered.
A couple of years ago I sat at this bar eating great fish and chips, enjoying a little gentle craic with the barman, but not tonight.
Once my dinner is in me I’ll not feel like hanging around. Sitting alone at a table, I feel self-conscious, a bit too BillyNoMates for my liking.
In pubs, bars and especially hotels, barstools are disappearing. There’s so little money to be made from selling booze these days, pubs and hotels sacrifice service at the bar to focus on flogging food to tables.
As a single person who likes to spend an hour or three in a bar drinking whiskey, I truly deeply mourn their passing.
I love barstools.
It makes no difference if it’s a tiny stool in a train station corner bar; a familiar friend in one of my locals, or a stool which hasn’t yet had the opportunity to meld with my voluptuous arse: wherever the barstool, I sit, breathe out, relax and stare at the optics.
At the bar I am blissfully and defiantly alone: might want conversation, but more likely I just want to sit, sip whiskey and trigger reflections in my brainbox.
All those random barstools in countless other bars.
This barstool here equals that barstool there.
What was life like, back there, back then?
Can I glean some wisdom from this mirror gazing?
Am I simply disappearing up my own hole?
That barstool in the Deluxe on Upper Haight, San Francisco, when I lived down the road. The barman had cheeky eyes, twinkling between the brim of his straw boater hat and his grey waxed moustache. That was a good cocktail bar.
We’ve already lived America through our movie screens and TVs, so the bars are familiar to our European eyes. Different from both English and Irish pubs and European cafés, I love American bars. They feed my addiction to their low-life culture.
My mind wanders to that wobbly tall wooden barstool in the bar just up from the Projects. Good people who were looking out for me advised me not to drink there, but they needn't have worried.
I grew up sitting on barstools in London pubs, where mine was a rare white face, so I never gave it a second thought.
Galway City and County are home to many of my favourite barstools. In the early 90s the middle three barstools in an Tobar, with Blitz on one side and The Body on the other, Whispering Blue serving behind the bar, that far away look in his eyes: everyone happily resigned to another great Galway night of excess.
The knackered brown barstools in Keogh’s in Ballyconneely, before Brendan converted the place in ’94. You’d leave with a rim imprinted on your buttocks from the frame, while the cushion, long retired from supporting human backsides, actually sank below the seat altogether.
While he was building the new pub, Brendan erected a massive marquee over the pub garden, and set up the bar inside. So for a few months we sat on barstools and drank our pints staring at a palm tree and a flower bed. Sometimes we thought we were losing our minds, drinking beer in Connemara while the white canvas walls blew in and out like vertical waves on the western wind.
That vital barstool in Terry’s in Clifden, where each trip I ceremoniously have a pint of Guinness in celebration of having yet again driven past my hills and lakes; yet again been moved and enthralled.
Sadly, over the decades, it has also become the barstool to which I flee when someone dies.
Any of the middle stools at the bar of Harriet Leander’s Nimmo’s, with Charlie Minot behind the bar. Bliss.
The corner of the front bar in (the old) Taylor’s Bar; a great afternoon barstool. Just away from the window, perfect for a crossword, to look out at a rainy Dominick Street, or over the bar to inimitable Una.
Down the road, the barstool at the very far end of the Blue Note used to have my arse-groove worn into it.
A freezing cold midweek afternoon in Neactain’s middle bar, on the barstool facing the coal fire; steam from the wetness of my jacket, staring at Boske’s fantastic festival posters.
To this day, any barstool downstairs at The Crane.
A rare place indeed.
Long may it last as it is.
So much of our society, from supermarket shopping to housing and holidays is geared towards couples and families, it’s a tragedy that we happy lone individuals are denied the chance to sit alone in silence, with our backs turned to the world, or have a good old chat with a bar person or the punter sitting next to us.
My late father, gordlovehim, who drank with and talked to locals and strangers alike, would definitely have said:
“More life destroyed by progress.”
©Charlie Adley
14.05.2025
