My backside and barstools – a life-long love affair!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Arriving deliberately early, I plonk my ass onto a barstool in the Hotel Meyrick and take stock.

As human beings we tend to seek constancies: people, places and possessions that might always be there. I’m lucky to have many precious and astonishing people in my life, a benign possession in Blue Bag, and for places: barstools.

There’s something about a barstool that sets my mind at ease. It has nothing to do with the drinking. Of course I’m looking forward to my whiskey but first I breathe out, slump forward a little and rest my elbows on the bar.

It makes no difference if it’s a tiny corner bar in a train station, a barstool in one of my old locals or a pub in which I’ve never been. Wherever the barstool, I sit, relax and stare at the optics. My back to the world, I’m defiantly alone. Might want conversation but more likely I just want to sit, sip whiskey and think of random barstools in countless other bars, and how I’m doing in life right now, compared to then.

It’s not obsessive. I’m not fascinated in rating my life performance to any great extent. It’s just that barstools trigger reflections in my brainbox.

This barstool here equals that barstool there.

What was life like, back there, back then?

Can I glean from it some wisdom or just self-indulgent romanticism?

That barstool in the Deluxe on Upper Haight, San Francisco, when I lived down the road. The barman wore a straw boater, cheeky eyes twinkling between his hat and his grey waxed moustache. That was a good cocktail bar.

America arrives familiar to our European eyes, as we’ve already lived there through our movie screens, TVs and books. I love American bars. Different from both English and Irish pubs and European café bars, they feed my love of American 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 pubs where mine was a rare white face, so I never gave it a second thought.

I was fine, as I am now, sitting in this bar in what used to be the Great Southern Hotel. I’ve been to the Meyrick only once since its conversion, and that was to a wedding, yet it lived up to my expectations.

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, so I’ll resist stifled sniffs and singing lyrical of the old place. There’ll be no yearning for concepts such as ‘cosy’ and ‘sumptuous’, no wittering wistful for the grand old Dame of a hotel she was.

No, I won’t do that, because the Meyrick appears very good at what it does, occupying the metallic monochrome glitzy side of anodyne. Looking across to the optics in front of me I feel like I’m in a place that knows what it’s doing, all the way from the staff to confidence that allows such sparseness on the walls. It’s neither different nor clichéd because there’s nothing to see, except the bricks which are, as my friend astutely points out, identical to London Underground’s restored platform walls.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.