A toast to the old man pub

I’ve always preferred ‘old man pubs’ to bars, old man pubs being the kind decked out in mahogany and offering up a gin and tonic to anyone clueless enough to ask for a cocktail. Having just moved to Glasgow, I find myself surrounded by these sorts of places, Scotland practically being the home of pubs so wooden they’d float. There’s a joy in walking into a pub and the staff knowing your name.

I’m 33 and I’d like to meet someone, but I also want to make friends. My initial idea was to use dating apps to contact people in Glasgow. I recced Hinge from Bath, where I last lived, and set up dates for the first week I arrived. It was all too easy – I only had to say I was new in Scotland and I was immediately offered a dozen tours.

What I really wanted was to be ‘friend-zoned’ by my dates. I purposefully didn’t dress up for the first meeting, thinking that if I looked like I hadn’t made a proper effort, it would signal a friendship rather than something more romantic. Twice it worked. But on a few other occasions, I didn’t get another call. They already had friends and didn’t need new ones. One guy did suggest meeting in Glasgow’s oldest pub, the Scotia, for our first date, which was a great shout, but looking around at all the interesting people I could be talking to, I decided after a month to keep the pub and lose the man.

It’s the characters who make these pubs so much more interesting than hipper bars. In one of my new locals, M.J. Heraghty’s, Jack the barman told me that the end of the bar was called ‘the deep end’ because it’s where all the big thinkers stood while trying to work out life’s difficult questions.