Beer And Loathing: A Night in Prague Bars

Charles Bridge, Prague.

Russian Barman: A Confession

The barman was friendly. From Russia, he told me, though brought up in Prague by way of a couple of years in Dublin. He wanted to go back there; he had an Irish girlfriend. I mentioned it seemed somewhat empty tonight in Prague - all my YouTube research warned me about the nightmare of overcrowding caused by the tourist hordes in summertime. He observed that maybe this out of the way place I’d chosen on Újezd - away from the tourist cattle ‘must-see’ haunts in the Old Town - was always going to be a bit quiet on a Monday night.

He went on to overshare. Warming to his theme, he said that he used to work in busy Old Town places, techno clubs and that sort of thing. I asked him, why he’d switched jobs to this locals’ bar? Well, he got caught selling drugs he replied with a smile whilst helping himself to another gratis refill of his beer.

Blur v Oasis: Dick Measuring

The guy on the bar stool to my right - Nathan, American I guess – heard my accent and started on a riff about music in general and Britpop in particular. How he preferred Blur over Oasis and that Damon Albarn was a genius. But this was like a Gen Z teenager holding forth on the Beatles to someone who’d actually watched them play Get Back live on the rooftop. He clammed up when I bitch-slapped him with my observation that I’d seen Blur many times in the early 90’s as far back as their Modern Life is Rubbish Tour. Oh! Music snobs don’t like it when, in the dick measuring contest of their wankery, the guy next to them is sporting a ten-inch compared to their meagre six.

But he was nice enough and we talked about New York and Chicago and New Orleans and Brighton versus Brighton Beach. The sort of ‘anywhere & everywhere’ conversation one has internationally. Perish the thought you’re parochial. Me? I visit Belgium regularly and voted for Brexit. Life isn’t simple.

I pulled the old guy routine again when I said my last trip to New York was probably a quarter of a century ago and that I used to party in the Windows on the World. You know, that bar at the top of the World Trade Centre.

“Fuck man! There was a bar there?”

A Beer Too Far?

Mmm. This wasn’t my first set of beers tonight. But, prompted by my Russian friend who needed to make up for his larceny - I ordered one more. Too soon, I made my excuses with some Pilsner still left in the glass. The shame. That’s, like, sacrilegious in my culture. But, with pissed bonhomie, I shook hands with Nathan, the barman and his newly arrived Irish girlfriend (also drinking for free). Back out into the Prague night.

Age. Longevity. Memory. There has to be a trade-off, doesn't there? You lose your looks; you lose your hair. You battle to stay thin. But inside - confused, commingled and somewhat capricious - we have memories, memories that make us human, that shyly reveal us as a bit player in a once popular drama that doesn’t run anymore beyond highlight reels or Youtube shorts.

The Girl by the Riverside Earlier

Before that bar, there were – of course - a few others. I’d started earlier, by the river, on the Lesser Town side. There was a joyful noise coming up from a bar in the Kampa region whilst crossing the Legion Bridge (Most Legií). People having fun. Live music. So, I went down to investigate and caught the last few songs of a local band playing outside the Jazz Dock watched by a large, enthusiastic Czech crowd. I only caught the last three songs. They were good. Sorta like The Cardigans (who they, granddad?).

Walking back to the bridge along the waterfront I was followed, and then led, by an attractive, single lady, thirty something who was on her own. I smiled. She smiled. She paused in her walk, I overtook her. I stopped, and she passed me slowly. Synchronicity is a good sign of attraction, I’ve found. Our paths collided when we reached the bridge.

She went left and I went right.

That’s okay: I needed a piss anyway.

What are the Signs and how to Miss Them

Another night. Before or after, not sure.

The woman at Stage Bar on Střelecký Ostrov island. A band was playing, so - as I was crossing anyway, I followed the noise and took the lift down from Legion Bridge (Most Legií). I stood at the back, watching the band, watching the crowd. The most gorgeous woman of indeterminate age, in a tight lime suit was next to me. She was getting into the music, arms in the air, swaying and constantly filling her glass from premixed cans stashed in her bag. She was beautiful; high cheek bones, prominent nose, curvaceous.

Readers, if I had to design, or wish for, a perfect woman, this was she. Alarmingly close, she wiggled, she lifted her jacket to show her ass, bent over on the table in front of me provocatively. She unbound her hair and shook it sensuously. I mean, all the signs! She did literally everything to entice me apart from drop down to her knees and fumble around in my trousers.

I, of course, faced with Yoda’s choice to do or not to do, chose nothing. I gave nothing, encouraged nothing. As she was putting on her show, I could see her stage whisper her friend seemingly asking, is he looking? I know this because the friend would obviously appraise me and the two would then giggle performatively. But I was frozen. Real life and real decisions. Not for me. Eventually the music stopped, as did her actions. Was I dreaming? Did I imagine a come-on? How would I, an observer but unobservant, even know?

I left as she pulled a bottle of prosecco out of her bag. If I was a certain type of guy, maybe I would have stuck around at this point, let nature and bubbles take their course and ride this tram to the next stop. But I’m not and I didn’t.

“You looking at my bird?”

The Pimp on Charles Bridge?

Disgusted with myself, all the beer I’d been drinking and the carby meals I’d been eating, I walked back through Lesser Town slowly and made my way to Charles Bridge. I pinballed drunkenly from side to side, seemingly always against the flow. It’s what I do. Usual crowd. Couples strolling arm-in-arm before heading to their hotel for perfunctory holiday sex. Youngish girls high on life and a couple of cocktails being silly. Guys being loud, annoying and drunk. Amidst this, a gorgeous, oh so beautiful lady, curvaceous in that modern way, smiled at me and I smiled back. Then I noticed a mean-looking guy nearby in jeans with a short hair cut and jacket fully done up. He was slowly walking in front and then behind her.

I paused. The girls didn’t move much. The guy didn’t move much. I walked on and they kept pace with me. I stopped and they seemed to stop. Wherever I was and whatever pace I walked, the guy seemed to be not that far away and kind of looking at me. His gaze wasn’t friendly. It wasn’t even a case now of him being a pimp watching his charges. I felt like a mark and hunted.

And, like a paranoid little bitch who’d watched too many ‘scams in Prague’ or ‘Be careful in Prague’ videos on YouTube, I picked up my skirts and fled the bridge back to the safety of my hotel. No more beers tonight.

Paranoia and missed opportunities. Is anything real? What is the truth? Am I sinking into the abyss or just drunk? Drunk and alone in Prague.

But there’s always tomorrow. I’m going to a comedy club. I feel like a fucking clown anyway. Based on tonight (last night, whatever; recently) I should be on stage and share my dating tips. Mic drop.

That though, dear readers, is another, and my next, story (to be overshared, of course).

Quotidian Notes / Read On

1) This is part of my Prague Quintet series of articles about the Czech capital covering art, music, museums, beer, bar escapades, trams, You know, the full Goulash with bread dumplings. Read part 1 Prague Castle Guide - Is it worth it? If you dare, Part 3 The Comedy Club Nightmare and the Crypto Guy. Now there is a story!

2) I’m liking this In Media Res style of writing. Keeps you guessing, no? Guessing whether I’m a wanker probably but a literary wanker at that. Literary discussion from a bar in Delft: F.Scott Fitzgerald - What a Bitch!

3) The comedy club night is a scorcher. You’ll love it! The right balance of wisdom and observation. Really? No, just a 1000 word bitch-fest.

4) I went to Prague first week in September 2026. It was warm.

5) What about reading my Krakow Bar Stories or maybe some Antwerp bar stories?

Prague Castle Review

Prague Castle: Is it worth it?

Whatever they say do, don’t do. Whatever they recommend, treat with caution.

I overheard a guide today at Prague Castle tell the flock gathered around her umbrella: “You’ve seen many magnificent sites today. Food for the soul. But what you now need is food for the body. I will show you an excellent cafe around the corner that serves the best coffee and cakes in all Prague. I will take you there.”

ABC: Always be closing.

Pro Tip: Based on five days of on-the-ground research, my "beat the crowds and feel smug" route appears at the end of this post.

Route 1: Up the Hill

I walked up the hill from the Lesser Town (Malá Strana) relatively early to beat the crowds. And yes, to get to Prague Castle (Pražský hrad) you will have to make the short but steep climb up either the Old Castle Stairs or The New Castle Stairs.

It’s certainly an investment in your calf muscles this excursion up the hill to Prague Castle. But, like, you have to do it. Don’t you? I mean, that’s what all the guides say; come to Prague, see the castle, cross Charles Bridge, rub a statue, blah, blah.

BTW: There is another way to get to the top. You can hire a ridiculously extended vintage car costing, in Czech Koruna, probably something like half this country’s GDP, and be driven past the sweating tourists all cursing you. This option is mainly taken by tourists who wear masks a lot. Even in an open-air car with your own family. Fuckwits.

And yes, I know there’s also a tram but, this blog supports walking wherever possible.

So, who else was also making this morning trek?

• Fat Americans, stopping every few steps, sweating profusely, caught twixt and between McDonald's and Starbucks (yes, there’s even a Starbucks here at Prague Castle along with authentic Czech kebab and weed shops).

• Koreans, also pausing every ten steps - this time for the obligatory selfie.

• Determined families, pushing their reluctant teenagers up the hill to get that parentally mandated culture fix, all whilst laden down with bread rolls and apples stolen from the hotel breakfast buffet.

• Me? Walking steadily but faster than this lot. Getting those steps in to negate the previous night’s beer and dumplings overload. 20,000 steps here we come!

You Made It!

And if you make the journey to the top - and you’re not too tired to rock when you get there - you’ll be glad you did. It's certainly pretty and boasts a great view over Prague spread out below you. Ornate palaces and churches sit randomly on a large site; it’s less a castle and more a collection of stately buildings on a hill - the entire district is called Hradčany. A bit like Wawel Castle in Kraków to be honest; there’s no real ‘there’, there.

I like history. I love architecture. But the rehearsed ‘pretend you give a fuckness’ I found up there leaves me colder than a foamy beer poured from an Old Town cellar bar into a refrigerated glass. But I won’t say it’s crap because it’s unique, historical, and hovers over the city like a sinister bat ready to swoop down and devour its tourist ant hordes below on Charles Bridge. You have to visit.

Without a guidebook or any research though, it’s probably a baffling trip; Karel this, Leopold that, palace of the beer vat, palace of the dumpling, Church of St. Beardy Guy… Yeah, okay, I admit it: I did fuck all research and I’m too cheap to pay for the ticket to see the interiors or get a guide. I guess I’ll carry that regret, that disappointment. But lightly.

Impressions: Cobblestones & Trucks

On the hour, every hour, a bell chimes to command the strolling tourist monks to the high mass of the changing of the guard. It summons them to the service of a higher power - those “I was in Prague’ Insta shots. Probably later scrubbed of the crowds. Yeah, it was just you there and the fancy soldier boys.

The constant pitter-patter of manic delivery trucks on the cobblestones was the pleasing soundtrack to my visit. If you get here early enough, your aimless wandering can be enhanced by the friendly “Get out of the fucking way, tourist” yell from tattooed drivers counting down that angst-filled hour before their first comforting beer of the day.

Observation: What is it with solo female travellers? They all seem to cradle large, extendable cameras around their necks. One watches as their hands play lovingly with the retractable lens - extending it, shrinking it, twisting it as they try to coax a perfect shot.

Groan. Yes readers, another poor sex metaphor. You love it.

Explore the whole complex slowly and at your own pace. There are many fine, lesser palaces in various styles and covered archways as you move around. It’s not all about the castle proper. If you absorb the vibe rather than hurrying around to get in the next queue, I think you’ll have a richer and less stressful time

The Descent: Some Marriage Advice

I walked back a different way (there are two main walking routes to and from the Lesser Town below). Interestingly, I was stopped on my way back down by a sweating and overweight American couple, pausing to catch their breath on their way up. The lady asked me: “Have you been to the Castle? Is it worth this climb?”

Now, the bastard, impish Tim would have said: “No, it’s a waste of time. Just stop here at this cafe - highly recommended I’ve heard - and have a couple too many beers each and discuss your secret S&M fantasy with your husband. To me, it looks like he secretly wants you to peg his arse vigorously. Y’all have a good day now!”

But I didn’t. I chickened out and said something safe like, “It’s not too much further, I think you’ll like it when you get there. There’s plenty of level ground. And a Starbucks.”

You see, I can be nice. IRL as the kids say. Master of the keyboard, I’m Vlad the Impaler crossed with Genghis Khan. With a touch of Amis, Hemingway, Wilde and Fitzgerald, of course. In person, well... I’m a Director at a fintech company.

And onward Tim marched downhill, across the river, off to his next stop. Unlike the castle delivery drivers, today I put in place a no-beer-before-1pm rule. I’m a man of resolute will and once I set my mind on something no pilsner pleasures can distract me. Okay, the first one was at 12:55pm. I break rules. Even my own.

Pro Tip: The Petřín Park Back Door!

I said at the start I have a good tip for you. Instead of marching straight up from Lesser Town like everyone else, make a proper walk of it and go via some of Prague’s hidden treasures.

Warning: If you’re a fat fuck, don’t bother as it is again a long, windy trek and the complete walk is around 5km or so. If that’s you, stick to those touristy Trdelník snacks and guide-recommended cafes that always seem just that little bit underwhelming and overpriced.

This route starts via the Legion Bridge (Most Legií) and leads up through Petřín Park. You come to the Castle from the opposite direction by walking through miles of beautiful, quiet parkland. Hardly anyone is there and you get vastly superior views of the city and the castle complex. That is because the expansive park sits high on the ridge, providing dozens of uncrowded vantage points as you progress over toward Hradčany.

You even pass through St. Wenceslas' Vineyard (Svatováclavská vinice) and copious orchards. You could almost be out in the rolling countryside, so peaceful is this route. No Starbucks in sight.

It’s a great walk. Nobody does it. Feel smug. You’re welcome.

Quotidian Notes

• Trip was early Sept and the temperature was 22-27C.

• Part of Prague Quintet series of articles. I thought I’d start with a nice touristy click-bait one first. Reel you in before I hit you with the bars, people, music, art and history diatribes. You’ve been warned!

• Part 2: Beer and Loathing: Missed Connections and Pimps is now up on the website. Reader caution advised!

• Part 3: The Comedy Club and the Crypto Guy. Going all Alpha in central Prague…

• To read about Krakow - and a similarly insightful Wawel Castle review - check out my Krakow Trilogy

• I’m often reviewing citys. My Scabrous City Tours - Antwerp, Bruges, Mons, Breda etc - should be read, well, now.

A Night Out in Birmingham

Why is this picture of Katie O’Brien’s out of focus?

Well, I did not expect that.

I was in the centre of Birmingham this week. Work trip up from London. Hotel off New Street. Doing that bar hopping thing. Apparently England had a World Cup game the night before at 1am in Mexico and so most people were sleeping it off. Not me. I don’t give a fuck about football. Not since 1980 anyway. Is Kevin Keegan still playing?

So, Brum seemed unusually quiet tonight. I went to a few bars. Had a curry at my favourite Birmingham curry house The Indian Streatery. Went back to my hotel to prep for the conference next day. Yes, dear readers, I’m important and attend events near and far to listen to the worthy, the unworthy, the boring, dear customers, would be customers and industry leaders as they read poorly off Powerpoints or rant randomly. And I get to post selfies on LinkedIn and pretend that I give a fuck.

Once more unto the Brum, dear friends

But something made me go out for one more foray into the goodly night. It was too early for YouTube and lube. So I went out armed with my performative notebook so I could jot down some ‘ideas’. You know, like proper businessmen do. Or posey wankers. Lists and listettes, ideas and ideation. Bullshit from an unobserved corner table - screaming look at me! look at me! - compensatory activity. I’m well versed in this. You should know that I’m not just the face plant guy from Mons. Oh no! I hold down a serious job doing serious things.

So, walking down New Street, I went up Temple Street and into Katie O’Brien’s. As I said, Birmingham was dead tonight apart from the usual quotidian town centre zombie apocalypse types and hoodies on scooters intimidating all comers. But I walked passed them all and climbed up into the bar. Been there before. Usually empty.

But not tonight…

Stepford Wives

Fuck! I’d landed in the valley of the dolls! Literally all the Stepford Wives and their beautiful daughters were arrayed before me. Without sounding too lechorous - oh go on Tim, go on! do - I’d walked into a pub with, how many?, fifty beautiful blonde ladies.

And, dear reader, not a bloody tattoo to be seen.

Everyone of them was wearing a figure hugging dress, had perfect make up and, most particularly, long beautiful wavy (mostly) blonde hair. No tacky extensions clipped just for the night here. Now, of course, I’m from a generation that eschewed tattoos and relegated them to sailors, tarts and prison bitches. Latterly though, the youth of the UK sport sleeves, incomprehensible signs, wordy platitudes nestling with dog names, ex-lovers, flowers, fantastic creatures, football clubs and, generally - let’s be honest - poor designs.

Sit down grandad...

But here I was with 50 Stepford Wives and their daughters. Mainly their daughters. I looked. How I looked! And indeed, how I was caught looking. Of course. And yet still I stared; a street anthropologist discovering a lost tribe of attractive women. Rare. Immaculate. Inviolate.

Of course, and I must for obvious reasons, say; it’s all subjective. I get that. Many people find tattoos and slovenly dress attractive in women. But, nah, fuck that, not me. Well dressed, well coiffured, nice make up, pretty faces with no botox: That’s my preference, your honour. We’re all entitled to our standards of beauty and this is mine. (Lost your mirror, Tim?) But here, en masse, were fifty fantasies. What had I stumbled on? Had fallen into a time loop and was I now in 1955? Where’s the DeLorean?

An Irish Wedding?

And they were having a good time! Irish music played. Songs of pride. Songs of revolution. Songs of drink. They screamed at each other above the music. They sang. They danced. They drank. And drank again. Vodka took a pounding as did Aperol. Tequilas may have been slammed. The men - their men? - mainly stood around tables chugging Guinness, laughing inclusively, but not interacting with their women folk. No words needed to be said. No danger here. Their presence, my timidity, their beauty, my notebook, cleaved an invisible Lancelot’s sword between me and the ladies. I could watch, agog, amazed, but unobserved and wilfully paralysed.

Never have I seen so many attractive ladies in one place and never have I felt so invisible. I was there but I wasn’t. My part was to mumble silently in the chorus, my lines were cut, I was but a shade in this vision - just passing through - observing but not participating in this Brummie Brigadoon.

And all too soon, they left in twos and threes, and fours and fives to go to a mythical ‘next place’. Maybe they were transported into another time, a once and future land of reels and dances, good times, smiles and elegance.

I drank my Guinness at the bar, picked up my notebook and left for my hotel. What had I seen? What had I wandered into and through?

Wasn’t bloody Birmingham petal!

Quotidian Notes

1) It’s not to say I diss all tattoos. But their ever present presence, their variable quality, stands as a marker. Time breaths: You were young then, now you are not. The past was a different - un-inked - country. Canute like, it’s useless to rage at the oncoming tide.

2) But what was the occasion? A wedding? A Wake? If only I had the ability to converse. But that night, I was dumb and, frankly, dumbfounded.

3) Why was I in Birmingham? My ways and movements are unknowable. I like hiding in plain sight.

4) Check out my night out in Mons for the face plant. Or my night in Bruges for the Irish bar I went to. Perhaps the night in Breda where I rocked the Dutch?

The 3rd Battle of Mons

Mons Station. Great Design. Weird Carpark

Station. Great Design. Clown Show

(Part 3 of my Franco’s Fiesta summer Tour June 2026. Read about Rocking Out in Breda and The Banjos of Monschau if you want to see the earlier legs.)

Not to cheapen the British army, but here I am, in Mons, flying the flag. My battle is less, braving German machine guns, and more, getting that ‘la même chose’ vibe going.

There was a festival in Mons this week. Still going on but, frankly, it’s in the vinegar strokes. As there were closed streets and chaotic, horn-blaring traffic jams around La Grand Place and, advised by my ever ‘reliable’ AI, I parked at the station. The station building - BTW - is an amazing architectural piece of modern urban design - futuristic, beautiful and functional (Corbusier, hang your pedantic communist head in shame). But, like all big cities (see my Gare du Nord articles), the area around the station is a clown show of human folly, waste and grift. So, urban eyes to the fore, I adopted the head down, ‘non’ to every supplicant and headed out through the rain and into Mons.

The Mons Mount

The centre is on a goddam hill! Who tells you that? In Belgium? To reach the Grand Place, the citadel, you literally have to climb up vertiginous rain soaked cobbled streets. And me - clever me - left my bag back in the station whilst I tracked down the hotel. So, I did the Station. Hotel. Station. Hotel thing. Soaked with the rain. Sweating like a bitch in the sun. What’s up the weather? What’s up with the hill of Mons? Forget going over the top, getting to the top in Mons is a fucking push.

The Linguistic Divide

Everyone knows Belgium is split into two. We have the Flemish in the North who speak Dutch and we have the Wallonians (in the South, roughly) who speak French. Brussels / Bruxelles is bi-lingual by law though the lingua Franca is predominantly French. Yes, there’s a small German speaking community (around Monschau BTW) but essentially Belgium is a 50:50 split.

Hitherto (note to self: wanker) I’ve stuck to the Flemish side; Antwerp, Bruges, Gent. This is my first foray (outside Brussels) into the French part of Belgium since, I dunno, 1982? The difference? Well, they drink the same beer, they eat the same food but; how to say this? The Flemish speak English without hesitation - smiling / welcoming - whereas the Wallonians, not so much. Like their French cousins across the border, they don’t feel the need to facilitate tourists with English. That’s okay, I thought, I speak a little French. And yes, I needed it. My advice to tourists, buy a French phrase book and make the bloody effort.

The Battle of the Beer

I know there’s an age old friendly enmity between France and England. But Belgium? Wallonia? What the fuck did we do to screw them over aside from giving then their country (read some history proles)? I feel almost as though Brexit was not a declaration of UK’s independence but a fuck you to the French speaking part of Belgium. Chill, mes amis, we still love you. I’d come to this part of Belgium more often if you opened your insular arms a little more.

I get that I’m straying cluelessly into darkened caverns of socio-political-linguistic minefields. Yeah, whatever.

But my glass is empty. The barman studiedly ignores this. I have money but, it’s seems there’s a performative dance going on here. Maybe he’s friends with my banjo playing friends in Monschau?

But, let’s run a split test. Two young, attractive students have just sat down. I bet beardy serves them first. As he does so I watch the dregs in my empty glass literally evaporate in front of me. I wait and I wait until I surrender all pride and wave my hands above my head like a hairdresser winning a Liza Minelli concert ticket. ‘La même chose!’

Gruff barman gives me my beer. In a way, I guess I like the Gallic ‘fuck you’ attitude. It’s one of the reasons I love France (and, by extension Rattachist Wallonia). It forces you - with good reason - to speak French.

Lest it seem I’m just a curmudgeon whining about slow service (I am! I am!) read note seven below. As with all these pieces, a cynic is just a disappointed optimist waiting to be proved wrong.

A fashion aside

Okay, it’s a student town but…. Why do ‘students’ wear their hoodies with the hood up? Guys, you ain’t gangsters. I know Wallonia is the bitch of Belgium, but really? Come on. You’re better than that. Magritte? Brel? Jean Claude van Damme (yeah, a bit dicey that one). Plastic Betrand. Put the hoods down, mecs.

Grand Place - A Sport? A Mating Ritual?

There’s a team game going on in Grand Place. A local game, clearly. Part of the festival. No one seems to know what’s going on. I asked the barman - more willingly multi lingual than the last one - and he hadn’t a scooby either. Lots of shouting, nothing making sense just a bunch of men in team colours shouting at each other. And shout and argue they do. The EU as a sport anyone?

The sun has finally come out or maybe my beer jacket is now working as it should. I’m several Belgian beers down and, admittedly, beginning to sway in the non existent breeze. The Grand Place is, like many Belgium centres, beautiful and replete with grand medieval buildings, for example, the city hall pictured below. From my seat I observe. Well, tangentially, of course, as my main focus is the beer and failing badly with les jolies femmes.

Two ladies on a table in front of me seem to require my presence. Unspoken words and indistinct glances beckon me forward. I pick up my glass and go over to talk about life, love and beer. But I trip, I stumble and fall, sprawling pathetically in front of them, an unwelcome supplicant prostrate, as my glass pirouettes in the air before smashing at their feet. Disgusted, they look away… No, there’s no way out of this… Fucks are not being given in Grand Place and so I stagger to my feet, humiliated and leave. But, the beer has one last embarrassing stop off for me as I somehow get into a student club and play the oldest swinger in town swaying to the awful ‘music’. I catch a glimpse of a neon gargoyle version of myself through the distorted lens of a dance floor mirror. Errrhh! It’s enough. Goodnight Belgium. It’s time for time honoured collapse on the hotel room floor fully clothed to fitfully sleep uncomfortably until four am. Who is this guy and why does he do this?

Yeah, Mons man. It’s a battle. Bought my book yet? Cheap on Amazon.

---

Bar Review

The still hazy after all these beers memorial write up:-

So many. Let’s see, on Grand Place, L'Excelsior. No wifi. So no marks. The owner seemed more interested in having an argument with some tramp who was trying to use the loos. Good old row with robust opinions stated boldly and loudly on both sides. I left. No one noticed. The floor show continued.

Onto La Vie est Belge at the corner of Grand Place. Had a paddle of four different Belgian beers, some salami, some cheese. I was under an awning outside the door as the monsoon hit which allowed me to tuck into the beer and snacks I ordered. Barman giving a fuck score, 5/10.

Onto Jekyll opposite the town hall. Stayed out on a table in the Grand Place. Nice in the sun and very busy. Frankly don’t remember much apart from that it was crowded, but waiter was more friendly than usual - well, he served me, plusieurs fois - and I think they had wifi. Gallic shrugometre: 6/10. Scene of my face plant.

Just down from Grand Place is Marché aux Herbes. Very lively in the evening with students everywhere. Went to Baromètre MONS. It’s a bar on the corner and very busy when I was there which meant that the service was a bit slow for the English guy with the laptop. I don’t blame them TBH, laptop guy will probably just write something bitchy. Oh, I just did.

Mons best bar? Two, actually.

And the winner is, a split tie between Jekyll - great in sun, probably expensive but I’d got to the state where I just flashed my card, said c’est bon and troughed away - and La Vie Est Belge which, inside seems very pretty. Only went in to the loo though. Me. The Beers. The snacks. The awning and the rain outside. La Vraie Belgique!

Hotel - Martin’s Dream Hotel

Arrived early. They let me have my room. Free breakfast (I needed it, oh did I need it!). Spoke French at the reception and in subsequent interactions. Martin’s Dream Hotel, is situated on Rue de la Grande Triperie which is well placed to begin your ascent to the top of Mount Mons. Apparently a spa hotel but this was neither offered nor explained. I suppose I was too busy looking for beer anyway.

Quotidian Notes

1) The game they played in Grand Place is Doudou or something. Basically bearded men shouting at each other with little else going on. Important historical festival thing reduced to a ‘what the fuck are they doing’ semi curiosity from pissed tourists.

2) Mons = mount / mountain in Latin. That makes sense. That, Tim, is why there’s a fucking hill you dumb, no-research-before-you-arrive, twat.

3) What about da ladies I hear no-one ask? Well… There was that lady on the next table. No, no. There was that time at that bar. You know, stumble. Er, no. The club? Oh the embarrassment! These stories will remain untold, unlamented and soon, forgot. Which is a coy way of saying, I failed like a pro waving my shitty stick at all available candidates. And you dear reader, do you care? No? Gallic shrug.

4) The tour continued with a stop off on the coast, comme d’habitude, for a supermarket top up for, fuck knows, I dunno, more beers? Mustard? Waffles? Will be added in my forecoming tour summary.

5) The station was designed by Santiago Calatrava BTW. No, me neither. I have unknowingly come across his work in the renovation of Valencia’s river district though where - pre his designs - some of Franco’s Fiesta is set. Maybe here in Mons he should have put beds and / or pissoires in the underground car park (cos that what it’s used for).

6) I’ll be back to Belgium. Probably not to Mons.

7) Shout out to the great guy I met in the cavernous and slightly intimidating underground station car park. I was trying to get out of Mons but how to pay for parking? The carpark is huge - quarter of mile long, perhaps. Sensing my frustration and bewilderment, a Belgian guy exiting the car park, stopped his car, asked if he could help, sat in my passenger seat and directed me to one, solitary pay machine, hidden away at the far end. He didn’t have to do this but his help, unasked for but so needed, was greatly appreciated. Thank you mate for this act of selfless kindness. We spoke in French.

Read on!

Read about a rainy night in Breda as I revived a Neil Diamond classic. Or perhaps my thoughts on the picture postcard beauty, and variable experiences, in pretty Monschau. The tour as a whole can be accessed thus, Franco’s Fiesta Tour.

Then there is The Darkness of Bruges. A rainy night in Delaneys Bar. What was the darkness? Well, click and you shall find out.

Enjoy!

Breda: The Franco’s Fiesta Tour

Street Scene: Breda June 2026

Flip over. Play the B Side

I was gonna one way about Breda. And then, I flipped it and went hard the other way. Wow! What a night. Didn’t expect that. See the video below. But back to ‘the story’.

---

“Wise words, Sir, stand the test of time, and I am very glad the House has allowed me, after an interval of fifteen years, to raise the tattered flag I found lying on a stricken field.” Churchill House of Commons 1901

---

Churchill and Breda?

Winston Churchill, in one of first speeches as a newly elected MP, vainly defended his mad, bad and syphilitic father Randolph. The words echo to me now, sat in Café Bruxelles in Breda, as I also try to raise a different tattered flag from a stricken field.

(Editor note, raising flags from where they lie fallen… Mmm. What could that be a metaphor for? Yeah, doing poor sex gags again. Sorry. Not sorry.)

But my cause is different, though perhaps equally as hopeless. I’m in Breda, in June, surrounded by Belgian beers (yes, I know they should be Dutch, but Heineken tastes like piss) and an empty bowl of bitterballen. I start with a purpose that is clear as I reach down upon ancient literary battlefields, stooping for the pride lost so very long ago.

So, we’re going to do what we call a ‘parallel narrative’ here, in one stream we have Breda, the bars and yeah, all that. On the other, I’m going to interweave talking about my book. And then, I’ll show you a video of Breda. Well a bar in Breda. No, me, in a bar, in Breda. Enjoy!

My novel Franco’s Fiesta.

FF - as it was never known - is not about Breda (though I will get to that, video evidence below, don’t worry would-be tourist doing a quick Google search). As a novel, Franco’s Fiesta was ahead of its time. A prophet without honour in its own chosen field. A dark star obscured on a stormy night. It was the unattributed fart in the lift of literary taste.

Yeah, I think I bought all the copies. And yet, and yet. The ghost of it lingers on, on Amazon. The paperback version - those few copies I didn’t buy - are being resold for high prices. No residuals for me I hasten to add (and at higher prices, goddamn it!).

I read one of my copies every now and again. I like a good page turner. Being honest, there are many things I like about it and several that I don’t. I know what I was trying to achieve, what I was trying to say - who and what I was appealing to. In this, I nearly succeeded. Writers are solitary creatures and I, at that point in my life, needed to turn inwards. So, I wrote a novel in a way I never had before or have since. Process over performance.

Breda, Anyone?

But enough of my yakking. This bar in Breda plays a real eclectic mix of English music. They’re playing Smokie now; ‘Next Door to Alice” for example. No, not the shit version that added the line “Alice, Alice, who the fuck is Alice’. Love the music selection here. Some Beatles now. Music: Our greatest export. The UK is revered the world over for our pop and rock. Next one? ‘Winner Takes it All’ - dammit - the best song ever! From Sweden.

Breda: Things I won’t be talking about for those tourists that have strayed here.

• The church (St. fuck knows, highest bellend tower blah blah)

• The museums (lace or something)

• All the other stuff

Things I will be talking about

• Me

• Franco’s Fiesta

• Bars and Food in Breda. Getting slowly dazed and confused (step away from that laptop, Tim).

• Why the fuck it is pissing down in June like Noah needs to build a bloody ark (if they had hills around here)?

• Random interactions that a handsome, brown eyed man gets into. For example:

The Two Girls In the Bar

They will - forever - remain the two girls in the bar. It’s too early in the day for quotidian flirting. I’ve not even checked into my posh hotel yet but I’m three beers and seven bitterballen down. Still; there are two attractive ladies in Bar Bruxelles… We sat near each other; they, chatting knocking back wine, laughing, brushing back their hair, me, tapping on my laptop, pretending not to notice. I went outside, they went outside. Tick. They went inside and, er, I followed. So cool, so Alpha unchained. I left the bar unobserved. They’ll think about me tonight.

Back to the plot

The plot? I lost that some beers ago. They’ll be more about Breda but first, let’s talk about me, the misunderstood artist.

(This literary device - the awkward pivot - is something I mastered despite not going having a degree in modern dance. A shimmy here, a shake there, a graceful pirouette, this muscle memory allows me to pivot shamelessly from one thing to another with poise and years of practice.)

Franco’s Fiesta (for we are talking about this, in Breda) was a unique experience in my literary career as I wasn’t in the novel. Well; a bit, of course, but not much. I deliberately wrote it to get away from my usual ‘short guy whines about not getting the girl’ plot my previous novels explored ad nauseam. (See Two Girls In the Bar Above for a new episode of this long running drama).

Interestingly enough, the first 50 or so pages of Franco’s Fiesta were written abroad, in a village outside Valencia. Hence, I had real insight into the local colour, sights, flavours, rhythms and signs. The plot is a rather obvious take on Richard Burton making a movie with a hot, and younger, co-star whilst the Elizabeth Taylor character watches on, observing from one bourbon to another. Add the Falangist regime, a strung out Eric Clapton cameo plus a Marxist director and you have a great story. At least, that’s what I thought.

Although I’m old, so very old, I don’t actually remember 1970 when the novel was set. Consequently I spent ages researching the feel of Spain, of Valencia in 1970. I’d write down descriptions of market squares, of shops, of shop signs, of children playing in the street late on hot summer evenings. The layout of the brickwork in the market square. The smell and look of the vegetation as the seasons changed.

Here’s how the marketing plan went.

• A runaway successful novel. Bought by millions. Of course.

• Calls, so many calls!, from top drawer agents wanted to represent me to sell the movie rights. I know the difference between net and gross, so don’t take the piss, mate!

• A bidding war between various studios. “Not less than 7 digits or I walk".”

• A multi million advance. Spent well, no revenge spend there. Hi - ex colleagues! Look at me now, bitches in my Ferrari.

• Chat shows. Think pieces in the broadsheets. Is he the new Amis?

• A large salary paid as an advisor on the movie version of the picture. Casting rights? “Just tell again, how much do you want this part?”

• Several gossipy articles about how Tim Robson has been seen partying in Hollywood linked to several famous actresses. (Passed on by Tim to every girl in his life, ever.)

• Critically acclaimed film release supported by stellar box office returns. “Is that Armani, Tim? Who’s that on your arm?”

• Rinse. Repeat. Arise Sir Tim

However, my GTM missed the mark on one or two of the above. So let me list those misses:

• All of them.

Bars In Breda

De Heeren van Breda - just off the main square. It rained. And it rained. Friendly staff. WIfi works outside (under an awning). Edited most of this masterpiece in ‘observational tourism’ there. The main customers seemed to be the bar staff and their friends. Loved how the bar man, knowing I was English, called me ‘mate’.

Café Bruxelles - Large, wooden, central bar, interested barmaid who I gave carte blanche to recommend beers. My type of place. Again; friendly staff. Slightly wonky table as I wrote some of this masterpiece. See two girls interaction. It’s why I do this for you.

The other one - Jaap? Sat next to two alcoholic women balanced by two alcoholic men on the other side. A Dutch sandwich, lightly toasted. I went deeply fried with a plate of Dutch bar snacks. They hold me still in their breadcrumby embrace. Lovely owners. You should go there.

The Next One - Probably won’t write about this. Through discretion or, more probably, embarrassment. Nah, fuck it:

Ended up on stage with a live band at Cafe Lievense across a canal from the main square. It’s like the 90’s never stopped. See video below. I give this place my whole hearted support. Chatted with owner. Nice guy. Good concept. Fun crowd. I rocked. As you can see yourself!

Flagpole. Breda. Hints.

I was going to write that I hoped I’d find those two girls from earlier on and tell them all about Winston’s flagpole quote. But, no one wins from that Tim, so I decided to go with a few 8% Delirium Reds instead. I know where my pleasures ultimately lie. No one’s going to be talking about flagpoles tonight so, here’s some random touristy things:

• Interesting that when listening to Dutch conversations between natives they often slip into English to make a point. Also, the rhythm of Dutch and English is very similar. Just got dragged into a football conversation about the Premier League. Had to admit, I know fuck all. The Crises of the 3rd Century? Mick Taylor guitar solos? They invited me over anyway. But… Laptop, yeah? I watch. You talk.

• Those tinkly bells on the hour. Every hour. In every Dutch city I’ve been to. You know you’re not in England.

• Are there any nicer people than the Dutch? They’re fluent in other languages but also friendly and cool. Always love coming back here. They love me too. I’m big here. See video below.

• Did I mention the rain? Seriously! Every bloody time. Well, not exactly true but pretty much. I went to Maastricht a few years back, my hotel had a pool next to which I posed in my long shorts (calm down ladies - it’s before I lost the weight!). It was only a few years ago and it seemed cash was king. Now? All about those Apple Wallets. Progress?

• Canals. Tick. Bikes. Tick.

• Come? Don’t come? Do you think I care? Buy the book.

Getting Down to Neil in Breda

Read On

It’s not my first time in the Low Countries. Follow the Franco’s Fiesta Tour of Breda, The Banjos of Monschau and The 3rd Battle of Mons. A triple threat (or more likely a Tripel).

You should check out Me and F Scott Fitzgerald in Delft or Rainy Antwerp or the Darkness of Bruges. Or just the whole lot - Scabrous City Tours.

Gare du Nord to Bastille - Easy Paris Walk

The July Column, Bastille, April 2026

Don’t be a prisoner of the Metro!

I’ve told you previously about walking from Gare du Nord to Palais Garnier. All that Haussmann architecture with structured wide avenues oozing elegance of proportional symmetries, iron balconies and 45 degree sloping roofs.

Well let’s go another way (said every roué ever). Just flip the other walk 45 degrees and let’s plough on down the old Parisian alleyway we call Boulevard de Magenta into the comforting loins of Place de la Bastille.

Yes, I’m basically using a poor sex metaphor to describe a walk. Again. Those that do, do. Those that don’t just make terrible puns and pen walking guides around Paris. So, here we go again, fresh off the Eurostar, avoiding the Metro and walking down to Place de la Bastille.

Route Logistics

Start Point: Gare du Nord

End Point: Place de la Bastille via Place de la République

Distance: 3.6km (2.2m) / about 50 min at a slow pace

Difficulty: Easy

Cafe/Bars: As many as your companion will let you.

Is it Safe?: Yes, just take the normal care you would in any big city. Be aware of your surroundings.

How Awful Is the Area Around Gare du Nord?

Pretty awful. But as a tourist following this guide and heading south, it’s a damn sight better than the poor buggers who bought a cheap hotel room in the area above Gare du Nord (La Chapelle). No Maurice Chevalier in a top hat tap dancing through the wide boulevards here. Yes dear readers, I regret that bit of hotels.com cheap skating.

But, follow my instructions and let me guide you away from the disunited nations of the frenzied and the avaricious crowding your entry point and lead you into the boulevards you imagined when you first booked that weekend break away to Paris to recapture what was once there, or what you hope could be there.

Blvd de Denain to Boulevard Magenta

Set off, like we did last time as I guided you Palais Garnier, head straight out of Gare du Nord, cross the road in front of you, and go down the first avenue you see - Blvd de Denain. As you do so, observe the gardens - newly planted - in the middle of this pedestrianised street but then hurry, hurry away from the too observant locals; hide your wallet, pocket your phone, wrap your Mountain Warehouse jacket tighter around your bum bag . But only for ten seconds. The latter part of Denain is as peaceful as a Normandy seascape under impressionistic skies. Yeah.

Same café, same refuge. This time 50cl of 1664 blanc. Why not? La même chose, monsieur. So after your pitstop at La Chaufferie, follow these precise instructions:

Turn left. Walk straight on.

And that my friends, is basically your instructions to get to Bastille. A masterclass in understatement, no? Pure clickbait that turns just five words of direction into a thousand word solipsistic essay of poor jokes, average alliteration and parti pris prose.

Boulevard de Magenta

As you join this stretch of Magenta, marvel at the fresh urban character. Rejoice at the impromptu street-art spray painted onto historic buildings. But don’t stop too long to avoid being a phoneless Gallic Banksy yourself. Purposely canter through this first section past men watching from the darkened shadows of doorways, eying each tourist for value, for weakness.

“Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world”

And then, like a beautiful Parisienne Spring - and is there anywhere better than Paris in Spring? - Magenta opens out, chills out and becomes that which we seek, Le Paris Profond. Cafes and boutiques spread in front of you like a unabashed lover; flower shops, cafes, patisseries. Vous êtes ici, vous êtes à Paris!

Magenta bleeds into Place de la République which is a major square flanked by those famous Paris brasseries Les Five Guys and Le Bloody Burger King. They stand a greasy guard to Marianne’s haughty Monument de la République in the centre of the square. Let us not forget that the French had a revolution and, before they started getting all gilet jaune on each other’s ass, it was a turning point in history of which they should be justly proud. A century after England, of course, but, yeah, whatever.

Serious Haussmann

Diagonalise the square and head down Boulevard du Temple. We’re now getting into serious Haussmann territory as the traction beam of Bastille draws us ever onwards. Do look at the houses and shops as you pass. The sad fate of the unfamiliar urban tourist is to keep eyes ground level watching out for the pavement crazy dancing oddly, eyes dimly confounded by internal riddles, dancing his dance and doing that jogging trousers falling off the arse boogie.

Huh Tim?

What I mean is, look up and around. There are many fine buildings that stand unobserved unless they are observed. Features and oddities, historical quirks, hide in plain sight. And it’s here, on Temple, that we’re in serious Aristocat territory. Balzac, Condorcet, Zola. All of ‘em. All of ‘em. The spirit of Old Goriot lingers here. De Gaulle, Mitterand, Johnny fucking Hallyday. French as a ripe Camembert or a sexist car ad.

And then, surrounded by mad traffic and repeated zebra crossings (how long must I wait for the green man?) - but avoiding the high speed scooters and electric bikes - we have the Colonne de Juillet at the centre of Bastille. You know, the place where the French started off their revolution by freeing all the prisoners. Back in the day, here in England, we use to cart ours off to Australia. Now we just let them out as we’ve no money to keep them in. The revolution of the penny pinchers.

Little bit of politics. Moving on.

The Beauty of Le Paris Profond

Paris is in the detail, not the broad strokes. It’s the adverts for intriguing looking films you will never see rotated on the hexagon signposts. It’s the ornate signs and orb’d candelabras of the Metro stations. The iron work of the balconies, the regularity of the buildings, the ever changing, ever present sight-line of trees.

But it’s mainly in the cafes spilling out onto the streets as you observe a world - more sensed than perhaps real - of smart sophisticated people in scarfs drinking little coffees, smoking cigarettes, engaging in those ornate flatteries that choreograph the opening moves - cinq à sept - towards an affair. An affirmation of a life lived right. La vie réelle.

Walk to Bastille bitches!

Obligatory Crap Map

Badly drawn map of a walk from Gare du Nord to Bastille

Other Walks / Cities

• What about Gare du Nord to Palais Garnier? or A Look at Robert Doisneau’s Le Basier de l’Hotel de Ville?

• Art appreciation. Lol! Tim goes to Honfleur on the track of the Impressionists. It’s about the light, you know.

• Or read more city reviews written from the comfort of bar stool (Antwerp, Bruges, Delft)
  

Quotidian Notes

1) Obviously the 1664 I had wasn’t the first, it wasn’t the last. I find càfe culture - and a constant refreshment of the glass -guides my pen. Like a higher power accessing truth. Here in Paris, there in Krakow, otherwise in Bruges or Antwerp.

2) Why am I in Paris? On business, mate, business. Doing deals you know.

3) The Cafe Flâneur Happy Hour photo. Too hard to resist. Am I a flâneur? Am I a world weary sophisicate leading you on? To where? To whom? Jean-Paul Sartre grasps at my shoulder but is shrugged off. Existential bitch. I travel but lightly.

4) And what the hell is Le Paris Profond? What’s that pretentiousness? Well, I made it up. It takes a foreigner to capture the essence of a place and it takes a jackdaw jobbing writer to steal, adapt and polish a phrase. Yes, Le Paris Profond will do. It fits. I am…I said.

Gare du Nord to Opéra: An Easy Parisienne Walk

Gare du Nord March 2026

Avoid the Metro & Take a Walk in Paris

So many of us arrive in Paris by Eurostar. Pitched into France, into the maelstrom of Gare du Nord. What to do? Where to go? Want to avoid the bustle of the Metro Station? The queues for the new Navigo card? Well, here’s a short walk that takes you safely and easily from the station right into the heart of Paris and the swanky Opera area. And, it’s pretty much one road - Rue La Fayette.

Route Logistics

Start Point: Gare du Nord

End Point: The Palais Garnier

Distance: 2.5km (1.5m) / about 35 min at a slow pace

Difficulty: Easy

Cafe/Bars: Many

Is it Safe?: Yes, just take the normal care you would in any big city. Be aware of your surroundings.

Gare du Nord - Orientation

Let’s face it. It’s a busy station in a capital city. Outside, a constant street theatre of hustlers, fake taxis and scammers await the unprepared tourist. I’ll guide you away from these and into Le Paris Profond; the Paris you see showcased in films that show the distinctive Baron Haussmann boulevards, buildings and smart cafes.

To start the walk; step off The Euro Star and you’re immediately facing in the right direction! Exit the front of the station and cross Pl. Napoléon III (the street directly in front of you). And then walk down Bd. de Denain. Over the last couple of years or so both Gare du Nord and this street have been undergoing major works to make them both more beautiful. Denain, long the habitué of English tourists looking for a café whilst they await their train home, is looking better these days. Amongst the cafés and bars that line this street, my favourite, right at the bottom left is Cafe Le Chaufferie. If you want a drink a light bite - with wifi - I always find this a good stop.

Rue La Fayette

Hero of two revolutions and the name of a one of the good Baron’s most iconic city thoroughfares. From the bottom of Denain, Rue La Fayette is more or less opposite you on the other side of Bd De Magenta. Once you are on Rue La Fayette, your navigation for this walk is basically over. Told you it was easy walk!

This road, with it’s straight line down to Palais Garnier is a riot of Haussmann cream coloured buildings complete with wrought iron clad balconies and iconic 45 degree sloping roofs. It’s also a place of many cafés which may tempt and beguile the weary tourist to stop off for a while. Why not? Paris is to walked and eaten and drunk. I always find the soul of a city in it’s non tourist spots, in the interplay of locals and cultures (see my bar reviews from Bruges, Antwerp, Krakow, for example).

Whether you choose to dally or just stroll, make sure you take time to take in the bustle and street life of a major French street. Avoid the electric bikes and scooters! If you want make sure you’re on the right track, you’ll pass the Metro Station Poissonnière. Here I want you to pause and feel slightly smug. To get even here by underground would have been to navigate a change at Gare d’Est. You don’t want to do that. Put in the steps and buy a pastry.

Haussmann’s wide boulevards always frame an iconic building and now, in the distance, the Palais Garnier should be in view. Your destination. Keep walking down La Fayette with the Palais as your guide and, in twenty of so minutes, you’ll be in the swanky Opéra district.

Bars in Opéra -de haut en bas

You got there! Much better to have walked, no? Seen Paris Profond. You’re now in striking distance of the Seine and The Louvre.

But, perhaps you’re thirsty and a little hungry and I’ve led you to the probably the most expensive part of Paris? Fear not! Tim has recommendations.

Expensive but Glamorous - Le Public House

We have history, Le Public House and I. My company hired this last year for a drinks reception for French clients. I made a speech in French. (Well, I meant make a speech in French but didn’t get much further than ‘Bonne soirée’ before lapsing into Franglais). Despite it’s name, it’s a very high end French brassiere. But you can get a pint of Guinness there. It’s very ornate but friendly. Great food and drink if you have the budget. A safe choice.

Tim’s Choice - The Frog Hop House

Basically an English pub style hostelry. The Frog Hop House is around the corner from Le Public House at 10 Rue des Capucines. When I was there I opted for their English style Winter Ale which, if you can see me drinking in the picture above!). It’s a friendly place with great bar staff and very much a ‘go up to the bar and order’ style. A great find and quite some bit cheaper - but less French - than Le Public House.

Obligatory Crap Map

An easy walk from Gare du Nord to Opéra

Further Reading / Comments

• Done the walk - comment below and read the walk from Gare du Nord to Bastille.

• For a nostalgic view of Paris through the iconic Doisneau photo “Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville” is a must read.

• Step out into Honfleur and my artistic tour of the Côte Fleury. It’s all about the light.

• For more city adventures click here.

Notes

1) What was my purpose in Paris on a bright Spring Day 2026? Don’t ask, don’t tell. My ways are mysterious and my life unknowable.

2) My images of Paris come from three sources: 1) The Aristocats 2) Memories of Paris in the 70’s and 80’s which I intermingle with my thoughts on 3) Doisneau’s Le Baiser de Hôtel de Ville.

3) I used to like the books of tickets you got to use on the Paris Metro. The new Navigo card is a step towards 2000’s London Underground’s Oyster card. Much easier is the current London system of accepting credit cards to pay. Much simpler.

Blues in a long overcoat from Chicago

Tim Robson plays the blues, Chicago 1996

“Ladies and gentlemen, Kingston Mines is pleased to invite on stage from London, England, Mr Eric Clapton!”

And so was I announced to a smattering of applause from the 2am drinkers still sentient after a night of blues and beer in downtown Chicago. Dressed in a long overcoat. And scarf.

Kingston Mines, Chicago? Eric Clapton? Explain Tim

It’s well known, by those who are in the know, that Tim Robson knows the blues. I wake up in the morning and there is Mr Blues waiting on my pillow. I might not be off share cropping but man, that 7:41 to Victoria commute is a bitch. It was what the blues was built on.

Back when time was young and I was in corporate real estate, my bosses in the global company I worked for had their head office in Chicago. So when they held a conference, to O’Hare I was summoned. Not that I minded; I was young, between addresses, flying business class and had two pressing objectives on my mind.

1) I wanted a hotdog. Chicago’s the birthplace of the hotdog, right?

2) I wanted to go to a blues club. Chicago’s the birthplace of electric blues, right?

3) Yeah. You know what three is. More about that later.

Tequila Madness in Suburban Chicago

It was Christmas. Chicago was cold and snowy. On the second night the senior VP invited us around to his house in the suburbs for a festive celebration. All the houses were lit up like a Home Alone homage. The wind blew and the snow fell fitfully as the limo sped to his house.

There were buckets of beer. I helped myself. I had a colleague from Singapore who did the same job as me in her region. I was surprised, pleasantly of course, to find that Suzie was pretty damn attractive. That attractiveness increased throughout the evening as the bucket of beer was steadily emptied. She was fun, also looking for a good time once we’d done with the party which - wouldn’t you know - was full of corporate stiffs wanting to talk about real estate. Fuck that! I was here to party.

One cloud spotted my horizon. My American counterpart Jeff (or whatever his fucking name is, it’s a long time ago. Jeff will do.) was also much attracted to Suzie. He had poise, good looks and an easy mid western manner. Single as well, bastard. I’d try to corner Suzie in a room and lo! there was Jeff, all teeth and good humour. The urge to recede into beta-ness is strong.

But I was lucky that night. We had some sort of party game and I won a bottle of tequila. Of course, we three thought it a good idea to start doing shots. After a few of these I explained that I wanted to split and head to downtown Chicago and get that hot dog I wanted. And then watch some blues in a dive club somewhere.

Yes, let’s do that said Jeff and Suzie and so we made our excuses - ‘you’re boring fuckers and we're off to get wrecked mofos’ - and got in taxi and headed downtown.

Into the Club. Hotdog.

Pitched out somewhere in a wintry central Chicago, I located a hotdog joint and indulged my first passion. Yum! Loved it. It went down fast. One craving satisfied it was time to indulge in number two on my list in order to get number three. Somehow, stumbling through the night, we ended up in Kingston Mines blues club. It wasn’t busy but, there again, it wasn’t that early by the time we rolled in.

The house band was playing some uptempo ‘modern’ blues. Not Howlin’ Wolf or John Lee Hooker. Whatever. We took seats at the bar to watch. Music playing, Jeff and I spent most of our time trying to outdo the other as we competed for Suzie’s affections. I think at one point Jeff started to get the upper hand. Same old. Same old. So, this being the case, the beer and tequila decided I needed to let slip to Suzie that I played in bands back in the UK. How were they to know my bands were crap? Oasis weren’t worried.

Suzie seemed impressed. Very impressed. Jeff looked annoyed. Good. Suzie was so enthusiastic she rushed off to the stage and when the song ended, had a word with lead guitarist. They chatted for a while and I could see her pointing in my direction. Oh dear. I could see where this was going.

And then I was announced onto stage. Suzie had said jokingly, I was Eric Clapton. I don’t think anyone believed her. There I was in a long overcoat. Scarf. Pissed out my head. Better looking.

Reluctantly - well not really - I’m an incorrigible show off - I swayed to the stage. A few of the drunks at other tables clapped. The guitarist gave me his guitar and I strapped it on.

Playing the Blues in Chicago: A Sausage-Fingered Disaster

“Waddya wanna play?” asked Mr Bassist.

Drunk and out of my depth, I went route one. “Er, I’m A Man?”

“Sure, start it off.”

And then I realised my fingers had all become sausages. I’ve had my fair share of disasters on stage, broken strings, drunkenness, hostile audiences - and this could have been the worst of an impressive pile of humiliations. But, looking back into the room, I could see Jeff moving in on Suzie again, so I thrashed out those A-D-C blues chord shapes with more energy than finesse.

“Now when I was a young boy. Bout the age of five…” behind me, suddenly, crashed in the drums, bass and other guitar. Wow! I was rocking Chicago with a shit hot group in support.

My voice was croaky and world weary. That 2am tequila sound. Fitted the song perfectly. I got through two verses and then the guitarist leaned into me, “Take a solo, man.”

The only solos I can do - not well, not technical - are simplistic blues runs. But that night, in Kingston Mines, I was all thumbs. Wrong notes, missed strings, out of time, yes; all the Robson trademarks were present in that woeful solo. Mercifully brief. Realising I was all bravado and tequila, the other guitarist stepped in and blasted out a solo that seemed to be a step above the ones he’d been trotting out previously. Eat that Eric, he seemed to be saying with his fingers. Oh to be fluid like Mick Taylor.

And then back for a verse / chorus and I stood there taking the polite applause from the band and the indifference of the audience. Suzie cheered and Jeff politely banged his glass on the bar.

“You were amazing!” said Suzie. Time to leave.

Later back at the hotel at O’Hare

We got back to the hotel, the hangovers beginning to kick in. The conference would start at 8am with a working breakfast attended by the big boss. It was now 4.30am. In the elevator we pressed the buttons for our floors. I hit nine. Suzie hit thirteen. Jeff didn’t partake.

“Can’t you remember your own floor?” I sneered.

“Yeah, sure,” replied Jeff smiling. “Thirteen.”

Next Day

I was awoken by my phone ringing. Confused and tripping over my clothes hastily discarded all over the floor like mantraps, I picked it up.

“Tim, we’re all waiting for you,” said my boss annoyed. “We need the EMEA numbers and plan for the year.”

I looked at my watch. 8.20. And then. And then the headache kicked in. Followed by the rush to the bathroom. You know the story. Suffice to say, me and the bathrooms of hotel became intimate friends throughout the rest of the day. Possibly the most miserable day of my whole life. I’ve never had a handover this bad before or since. I played no part in the real estate conference and flew back to the UK suffering and dejected that night.

But - and who else can say this beyond a few, a select few, I’d played the blues in Chicago at the legendary Kingston Mines. Years distant from the events, I forget the hangover and look at those grainy pictures with pride. I rocked once!

Annoyed about Suzie though.

---

Quotidian Notes:

1) After this incident I couldn’t smell, let alone drink tequila for twenty years. This is something I’ve been manfully working on recently. We all love a trier!

2) All career episodes, that were all consuming once, fade with time. I forget what the Chicago conference was about. Something important, no doubt. But ultimately inconsequential. Work hard. Show up. But don’t take it seriously.

3) I still play the blues. Live it man! But, the tequila! We’re not all Keith Richards and in both my recording and live career (FFS sake Tim!) a couple of loosners is fine. More and all you get a drunken mess. Maybe I like it that way. Sabatage is the go-to excuse of the underachiever.

Want More?

Explore more Blues & 60s Music Trivia:

The Darkness of Bruges

Cafe Pick near The Grote Markt

The Girl in Delaney’s Bar, Bruges

She held nothing back. That was her way; maximum disclosure, honesty. Full and brutal honesty. There were incidents in her past, incidents that scarred her. Left their mark. Below the surface but ever present, just awaiting the right audience. The right amount of alcohol. Tonight, he was her audience and the drinks he bought encouraged a reckless stream of honest histories. He had bought more than her time; he’d acquired a dark world he never knew existed. A world he wanted to believe never existed. How he wished he’d just smiled and moved on.

Later she’d not smiled but had moved on. Into the Bruges night.

Earlier in The Grote Markt

The writer was in Bruges.

No, no; that won’t do. Say that again.

“The writer was in Bruges.”

Two lies and one truth in just one sentence.

He was in Bruges. True

But frankly, he was unused to being written about in the third person. An unnecessary literary conceit.

Also - to be picky - the description ‘writer’ does some heavy lifting in those five words.

Noted. But let’s move on.

The writer was in Bruges.

The Search for ‘the’ Bar

He walked through the pre Xmas crowds. Not for him the overpriced Christmas markets, the ‘hand-crafted’ baubles from China sold out of MDF huts by bored vendors on minimum wage. His purpose was more focused ; get pissed and write some scabrous observational piece from the vantage point of a bar stool. He’d done it before; in Antwerp. In Krakow. In Delft. And now Bruges; pretty and full of tourists and beer. His sorta place.

But although the beer flowed, the words would not come. Like a semi-drunk middle-aged man with a hot chick, it just wasn’t happening. His fingers poised on the keyboard, his eyes searched around the bars for life, for action, for those human foibles that populated his brand of travel writing.

It was raining. He’d got wet looking for that perfect bar. The perfect bar that had the right balance of observable transient people, friendly staff, couples decoupling or attempting to couple. But today, it wasn’t happening.

And so he stumbled into the night, this place and that place and until he found the place.

The Real Bruges Nightlife Story Begins…

Delaneys Irish bar. Oh the shame; an Irish bar in Bruges. He always avoided these, preferring, demanding local hostelries. But frustration and writer’s block blew him out of the rain and into Delaneys.

It must have been at the bar. It must have been that they were English. It could have been that they were away from home, looking for a good time away from all that home implies. Maybe a trail of bars paved their route and they were already semi drunk. But whatever the catalyst, they got talking.

A taller girl, polite but unengaged with the Writer, perhaps less refreshed, perhaps annoyed with her friends, kept her distance.

Another - let’s call her Roxanne - had a look of a chunky Michelle Pfeiffer about her. Or Cameron Diaz. He couldn’t remember which. She was on a mission. Some recent messy break up with her boyfriend back home, who, frankly, was a user and a loser. Or that’s the story her friends shared and who was the writer to dispute this? Men all are, in retrospect.

Did the writer rule himself out of Roxanne’s temporary redemption at the hands of a stranger in a foreign city? Did she, instantly comparing him to taller, fitter - younger - options in the now crowded bar, make it apparent he was not to be the author of her subsequent regret. Maybe.

We all like to believe we are agents of our own destiny. The writer, occasionally, believed this. That we briefly ascend above the quotidian and break free from the set of tracks life has assigned us. Or maybe it’s all chance and serendipity. He also believed this and perhaps his solo treks, his bar stool philosophising, was a detached celebration of this.

Life in the detail is infinitely wondrous. It’s when the lens pulls back you get to see ants scrabbling around in the preordained fashion.

Karen. Funny. Complex.

She - let’s call her Karen - instantly attracted him. She was shorter, with auburn hair. Perhaps prettier than in a less obvious way than her blonde friend on a mission. But she held one key advantage, she wanted to talk and she liked, for some reason, for some explicable reason, to chat with The Writer.

Being older, he held certain advantages. Life experience. Not having to worry how to pay for the next drink. A certain level of education and a lifetime of talking to customers, knowing when to listen, when to prompt, when to take control.

The drink flowed. The laptop, encased in a backpack, beyond a reassuring weight by his feet, was forgotten. No observations from the cheap seats tonight; he was now in the play itself, finding his voice as an actor.

To his studied witticisms and cod philosophising, she was open, a torrent of life history, describing characters he would never meet, out of context situations he could only dimly comprehend. It was pleasing to him. Everyone has a need to confess, given time, given circumstance and he allowed her the time.

Roxanne, naturally given her looks and stated mission, was hit upon by several gallants. One in particular, inappropriately old the writer sniffily thought, was doing better than the rest and the two faded from the rest in time honoured manner. Minutes later they were wrapped in a kissy embrace against a wall.

The writer and Karen moved to a table with their drinks and - fastidiously - the precious laptop. She was engaged, or about to be engaged. The prospective husband was all right she supposed but - I dunno - Karen, on this night, with this person, given distance, was unsure whether she was making the right decisions.

She was twenty nine.

The Darkness

There’s a darkness in all of us. Who can doubt this? Sensing opportunity but not the tools, The Writer saw a rare chance to impress. Uncertainty of home town affection, in a bar far away from home, is where a surface level conversation can start to operate on many levels. She, finding someone sensitive - a Writer, don’t you know, was with someone she could unburden herself upon. He? Well you know what he was thinking.

And she talked. Karen was an amusing anecdotalist. She made him laugh. He remembered this. She was funny but then, suddenly, serious, very serious. The amusing tales morphed and reshaped into a dark world of awful men, shocking memories, betrayals of trust. Fathers not being told in case they acted upon learning the truth and ended up in prison.

The Writer knew that maybe it was like this. That behind many women there were stories like this. Not the stories he liked to write but unwritten stories held within. Karen told him of two in a ‘that’s life’ type way. Not self-pitying. Not looking for sympathy - far from it - but related facts, just facts. She didn’t cry. There was no anger. Just resignation. Life’s like that, you know? What can you do?

The Writer went outside to think, ostensibly to vape. There was much to think about in that narrow, focused way drunks have. Was this how life really was? And if it was, what was his place in it? He had a code of honour, a belief in romance, in inevitable destinations through smiles, mutual attraction, consent. How much pain and regret and anger was there hidden? How much had he missed as he glided upon the surface of things, idiot-clever, never seeing another world below?

You snooze, you lose

Back in the bar the table was empty. Where was Karen? He searched the bar looking for her. Not here. Not there. Roxanne had detached herself from her erstwhile paramour and was now closely engaged with one of his younger friends. The first guy seemed angry and was being rationalised by the taller girl of the three. There was a version of ‘leave it, she not worth it’ speech in her mouth. He seemed unconvinced.

And then The Writer spotted Karen. Over at the far side of the bar perched on a bar stool next to a balding man with his arm around her. She was leaning in. He seemed happy with his possession, no doubt plotting next moves. The Writer already crestfallen, fell further. His place here was now redundant. His part in this play had been written out and he should gracefully exit left.

Something made him go over. He’d chatted to her for an hour. They had bonded. It seemed polite to say goodbye. To be the good guy he always imagined he was.

“Thank fuck you’re here! This guy is like a bloody octopus!” Karen detached herself and, picking up her drink, walked over to The Writer. His smile was instant. Doubts moved away as they went back to her friends. There was commotion between the two suitors of Roxanne that was rapidly attracting a crowd. Karen and friend formed an uneasy wall between the men, Roxanne and several late comers amused by the spectacle.

All was uproar and raised voices. Roxanne, now pissed, was arguing with her friends. She’d made a decision and wanted to go home with a third guy who, silently, had joined our group. He seemed sober, well dressed. Good looking. Yes, yes, just the sort thought The Writer bitterly.

The girls were arguing amongst themselves. Old enmities were brought up meeting counterpoints from way back. The taller one took charge. She was the most sober and clearly was the mother of the group. She suggested they take this outside. They all agreed. Karen raised her eyebrow at The Writer as they went outside onto the terrace. He stayed at the bar ordering a fresh Kriek. Best to stay out of it.

Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Alarmed, he rushed outside to see the three girls in the distance passing De Verliefden statue walking away at a fast pace.

Out into the darkness of Bruges.

---

Bars Visited?

Delaneys. Well obviously. It’s where all the action takes place. Central. Friendly.

Cafe Pick. Just off the Grote Markt. The Writer liked this one but whilst he was able to observe and write, there was nothing to observe and so nothing to write about. Probably too early.

The Trappist, The Monk, Bar Ran. Maybe. Maybe not. It was wet and I, sorry ‘The Writer’ may have visited these bars. Hard to tell. Better stories elsewhere, perhaps. He serves you with his talent and stories not with his literary dead-ends.

Look, there’s loads of bars in central Bruges. Make you own story.

Read On

• Like This? Read my take on Antwerp!. Armed with a laptop and a strong beer, Tim discusses the locals in a cafe on a rainy day.

• More Belgium. Yeah, why not. The 3rd Battle of Mons sees Tim in bar-hopping, face-planting, hill-climbing mode as he comes face-to-face with a neon lit gargoyle.

• Where does it all come from? Read Neil Diamond - Solitary Man. A song. A manifesto.

---

Rejection Corner : Hand On It, shocking examples of poor writing from this Bruges article

Let’s not batter the veneer of this literary creme brûlée too hard with our spoon. 

And my favourite:

Was life as the perpetual outsider, the not so detached observer of human follies finally realising the stinging words pointed at others were but pale cousins to the unwritten rebuke subliminally hidden ? 

Krakow: What to do, see, eat, avoid.

Wawel Castle Krakow, Summer 2025

(In which Tim, donning the ill fitting mantle of a travel writer, eschews bitchy bar room observations and talks about his general thoughts on Krakow. Probably not going to go too deep into the historic churches, castles, squares. There’s other bloggers for that. This is more about my impressions. Which is a pretentious way of saying, it’s some lazy old bollocks I wrote semi pissed into my notebook whilst writing the other two parts to my Krakow Trilogy.)

Anyway, Krakow.

Yes beautiful. Definitely come here. They speak perfect English everywhere. I quizzed a barman about this. It’s the lingua franca of our age. We all are dragged back to the universal English. Sorry French. Germans. Italians who, outside their own country have to meet serving staff in a third language. Our greatest achievement perhaps? The default option - the bitcoin of language.

I don’t really do touristy things but here’s my list:

The top ten of things to do in Krakow:

1) Wawel Castle. Yes, it’s the number one place to see and rightly so. Get your lazy arse up that hill and snap those tourist shots; you know the ones… The ones you get out your phone for and bore your friends with. It’s mostly free. Pay to wander around inside and pretend to be interested in 16th century tapestries, or something. I took the dragon’s cave steps down to the town for a small fee.

2) Oskar Schindler Factory museum. Well worth a trip across the river. Thought provoking and deftly handled. Read my article here.

3) Old Town Square. Yeah, it’s big. You’ll probably spend most of your time there anyway.

4) Get pissed in various bars and write scabrous & bitchy articles through hazes of practiced ennui enthused vodka. Read mine here.

5) The dumplings. Yeah, why not.

6) Parks and cleanliness. The whole of the old square is surrounded by a greenery. I believe this is the moat converted to parkland. Very lovely.

7) There is no 7. In fact, no 8, 9 or indeed, 10. Let’s move onto the drink (and food)!

Krakow Food and Drink Guide

There are lots of bars and restaurants. Where did I eat?

Polish cuisine. You can’t avoid the pierogi - those stuffed dumplings (meat / spinach, cheese, take your pick). I went to Mirror Bistro which is a pierogi specialist. I had the Borsch with an egg followed by meat pierogis with caramelised onions. Very traditional. A bit dry for my liking - wish I’d have paired with a cream sauce for that satisfied ‘fuck it, I’m on holiday’ experience. Washed down with beer. 82 Zloty (£18!)

As I’m trying to avoid potatoes / wheat etc, I looked up and went to salad bar Chimera. It’s situated in a street adjacent to the main square. Yeah, I know a salad bar sounds crap but this was a good find. It’s a pretty place in a covered courtyard. There’s a long counter with various salads but also the odd meat dish too. You pay per portion. It wasn’t expensive. I had a plate full of various salads and chicken washed down with beer and (the free) freshly squeezed orange juice.

And yes, I went to a Taste Poland (Grodzka) fast food joint just off the main square (Grodzka 38). I had more Pierogi, a Polish sausage and pickles plus my inevitable beer (see photo above to the right). Nothing to be snobby about, it was lovely and just what I needed. Fast and friendly service (you get a beeper which goes off when your order is ready). 78 Zloty (£16). If you need a quick but authentic fuel stop, I’d go here.

But I spent most of my time in bars. You know, how else does this stuff get written?

My favourite was B.O.H.O to which I returned three times. It’s on Stolarska 6 which is near Planty Park. Read my pissed up observations of this bar written on my three visits through hazes of practiced ennui enthused vodka here.

Black Gallery Pub. (Mikołajska 24 - just above Planty). A good stop off, intriguing bar on a couple of levels, wooden look, friendly bar staff. Worth a beer before (or after) dinner.

Other random observations about Krakow

Some observations about Krakow, Poland and the Polish based on a couple of days wandering around Krakow. Hot-takes are the best takes!

Denim shorts (mainly light denim like the 80’s never stopped). Must be like a national dress here in Poland. The temperature hit 30C whilst I was here and it seemed all the men - and a lot of the women - got their denim shorts out. Now, I don’t possess a pair and so, caught short, I constantly looked like a tourist. This is a disadvantage especially later on at night walking through the old town square and the main roads leading from it. A single male being identified as a tourist is not fun (see below).

Mobile phones. Polish people actually put their mobiles to their ears and have discreet conversations. And don’t put the recipient of their call on speaker phone. Oh how quaint and different from lovely Britannia where it is de rigueur to yell at the mobile and entertain your enraptured public with both sides of your conversation. The Poles clearly need to catch up.

There are some tramps in Krakow. They congregate darkly on the outer benches of the parks. With unkempt beards, unwashed clothes and scrappy backpacks, they pass local firewater between themselves. They don’t shout, they don’t harass. They don’t pitch tents on the pavement, shoot up drugs in front of you or lie comatose outside international rail stations (BTW: Krakow station is immaculate and a living embarrassment to the UK). In a way, the tramps of Krakow remind me of the old school alkies I remember from the 70’s who used to hang around Rochdale’s war memorial, dissolute but discreet. In the three days I was here, I wasn’t harassed by beggars once. 

But I was harassed during the day around the main square and river by a constant sea of hawkers, hawking their city tours, river tours, guided tours. They’re easy to spot and avoid as they like to dress up in colourful outfits. At night though, mmm, it’s a different story…

As a single man walking through the main square and the roads leading from it, I was constantly approached by, what’s the right words, pretty women who wanted me to come to a party. How friendly of them! Seemingly these parties are where women take their clothes off for money. For variation, their male counterparts - with a knowing nudge, nudge, wink, wink, also offered to take me to these self same parties.

Frankly it’s annoying and put a downer on my evening walks. However, Krakow isn’t the only place where this happens but it’s seedy and makes you distrust friendly faces and pretty girls. 

Pedestrian crossings. A strange observation perhaps but a telling one. Everyone waits for the green man signal before traversing the road. Even when there’s no traffic. Respect the culture. 

Travel to Krakow, how I did it, how much?

I went for three days late August 2025. I flew from Gatwick on Easy Jet. It takes just over two hours to get to Krakow. There’s a train station at the airport which takes you in twenty minutes to the central train station in Krakow. Tickets are easily bought from machines at the station or sold to you on the train. The trains are immaculate so much so that I wander up and down a few carriages thinking I was in first class. No, they’re just clean and comfy. I stayed in the IBIS budget next to the main shopping centre (and the main train station). Probably a 15 min walk to the old town. I didn’t feel unsafe wandering around - other than being accosted by enthusiasts of strip clubs. My flight back was with Wizz Air.

I booked via lastminute.com. The cost was just under £500 for the return flights and two nights at the hotel. Food, drink and entrance fees are cheap once you get there.

Further Guides / Read On

• Like this? Well, you’ll love the other two parts of my Krakow Trilogy. A morning trip to The Oskar Schindler Factory followed by some serious day drinking at Cafe BOHO. Who are the patrons and who is the girl in the red dress?

• What about The Darkness of Bruges. The Writer has an existentialist crisis in Delaneys Irish Bar off Grote Markt.

• Or curate your own experience back at the scabrous City Tours features page?
  
  

Thoughts from B.O.H.O. bar in Krakow

Day Drinking in Krakow

(In which a sweary Tim, vodka in one hand, beer in the other, laptop twix and between, attempts to summarise Poland’s second city sat in a bar; gradually sliding into a lulled pissness. The late summer heat is on in Krakow, the sun is shining and yet he manfully pens this hipshot hot take from within a bar taking refuge from tourists, near and perhaps within, the historic centre. Could I instead be sightseeing? Could I be looking through churches? Could I be describing the architecture? No. Fuck that. Même merde, endroit différent. For a similar cockeyed take on foreign cities, see my Thoughts from a bar in Antwerp)

Part of the Krakow Trilogy

A smoky Bar

The smoke fills the bar.

Diverse young people - in Gothic attire, suits, sporting tattoos, nose rings, ripped clothes, beards - smoke cigarettes like it’s Brighton 2007. Almost nostalgic, in fact.

Now, I’ve been around. Liberal Netherlands, for instance. Sans joint, you’re outside the joint these days. Alsjeblief. But here, and obviously not all bars in Krakow, smoking seems tolerated in some. I thought it was an EU-wide ban. Clearly not. Fans silently whir above me.

I don’t smoke (vape, anyone?) but the libertarian in me, likes the choice. I always thought - before the COVID gestapo overreach obviously - that blanket smoking bans were wrong: What about having smoking pubs and non smoking pubs? Let the public decide. But I lost the argument I never made.

Anyway, my new favourite bar in Krakow - B.O.H.O (on Stolarska Street) - doesn’t care. The clientele aren’t 50 something American tourist Karens waving their hands dismissively at the smoke, but locals and me. I sit inside. The small tables outside scoop up whatever tired tourists there are. Good, stay out on the pavement.

Pen Portraits: Tim Comes out Swinging!

I mean, who’s here with me right now in this back room (with open windows onto the street)?

On the next table, we have blonde mullet guy talking to - chatting up? - a brunette girl who is giving him too much eye contact for my liking. Get a fucking room! They’re both about twenty and lean ever so closely together and pore over each other’s mobiles to demonstrate a point / show an insightful Tictoc (or whatever kids use these days). Both smoke. And both - betraying their age perhaps - are drinking some iced coffee / chocolate concoction. I think, and who cares what I think, they’ll be some fumblings, some awkward love making tonight.

But maybe he should get her a vodka to help nature take its course?

Permed heavy rock guy in a long overcoat (why? It’s 25C) has just left with strappy top free spirited girl. Part of me hopes that, outside the bar, she thanks him for the coffee and overlong discussion about Star Wars minutiae, and then leaves him for the comforting vibration of a rampant rabbit or something. (Editor’s note: What the fuck do you know about this Tim? Straying from the path into the dark of Mirkwood here, methinks?).

We have tattooed lady in black lipstick and shades pouring over hand written sheets of paper. Maybe her novel. She has an oversized coffee and an ashtray in front of her. She earnestly consults her phone and then carefully writes onto her sheets of paper. Edits to her masterpiece? A manifesto of hate and dislocation perhaps. More likely unrequited love and pussycats? Dunno. She offered me her plug when my laptop looked like dying which was nice of her. Battery packs are a life saver in more than one way.

Blonde couple next to me have finished their drinks but have just lit up anyway. Money seems tight. Mmmm. Anyway. Her eye contact is getting ever more suggestive. As are her ‘innocent’ hand and knee movements that accidentally touch mullet guy. He seems clueless. Take the W mate. And yet. And yet. He prevaricates like he’s channelling the younger Tim Robson. Unable to close the deal, he’s moved back into his chair. As has she. That fleeting moment lost. Maybe I should help out?

I wonder, have they ever seen Indecent Proposal? Probably not. Am I playing the ageing satyr? The world weary roué? One million dollars reduced to a round or two of vodkas? Bad Tim. Bad Tim

They liven up to Love My Way by the Psychedelic Furs. It’s that sort of place. English Indie music. Perhaps I should let slip that the tune they’re half singing along to to, I saw performed at the Brighton Centre Feb 7th 1987. No? 1987! That’s like, a long fucking time ago granddad!

(The gig was to follow up on the beefed up version of Pretty in Pink which enlivened the movie de jour of the same name and briefly tickled the charts in 1986. All I remember of the gig was that they wore ridiculous raincoats which seem daft even in 1987. Not cool, just stupid.)

They sit engrossed in their own phones. She texts. He looks at something ephemeral. They leave. Probably it’ll happen on the balance of probabilities. Maybe not. I hope so. He put in the hours.

Nerds and Coffee

Two blokes in front of me smoke and tap on their laptops. No novels being created here. There’s a matrix of coding on one screen and impenetrable graphs on the other. Must be working. They flip between languages as they sip coffee.

Another couple sit in the corner. Apart from tangentially touching lighters and an ashtray, they sport an empty glass between them. He talks a lot. Baseball cap, wire glasses; he has views. Lots of views. The not unattactive girl robotically nods but leans her head against the wall, eyes closing. Although he’s speaking Polish, I think I can understand what he says. Roughly translated, ‘blah, blah, blah, I like to drive women away with a shitty stick’.

In fact; am I the only one in this bar who actually buys booze? The rest seem to get a coffee, a free water and then smoke cigarettes and live their life. Beardy who’s joined the two laptop nerds even takes a sip from a flask hidden in his bag and laughs as I spot him doing it. This is a fucking social club for writers, nerds and nerds trying to get laid.

The Lady in Red

Then a lady in a long red and tight dress walks in; all mystery and old time glamour. I try not to stare. She plonks down a thick feminist text and a packet of cigarettes on the table next to me and disappears off to the bar. Chance, serendipity both laugh their arse off at me. Me, who has to leave in ten minutes for the airport and out of Krakow, leaving Poland behind. I have The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera on the table next to my beer, my vodka, my laptop. Maybe she could have been the one. Maybe she would be more than just a bitchy footnote in a blog. A might have been. Indeed; She. Could. Have. Been. The. One.

But time. Circumstance. They mock my foolish thoughts and dreams.

So I drink up my beer, chug the vodka and finish this blog to the sounds of Ed’s Funky Diner.

Need a piss first though.

---

Slightly More Serious Review

B.O.H.O Coffee and Bar is within the Old Town area of Krakow, quite near to Planty Park. Small tables front the property. Inside it’s a pleasing mismatch of a large red armchairs and sofas, indispersed with more standard wooden tables. The bar staff are friendly, everyone smokes but - apart from a wannabe English writer - no one seems to drink alcohol that much. I make up for them. Could be that I came during the daytime.

It’s a cosy bar spread over three linked rooms and is frequented by locals, distressingly way younger than me. There’s a studenty / just graduated vibe to it. The atmosphere is welcoming though and was the perfect place for me to write - in fact - it’s harder to spot those without a laptop than those with.

The music tends to be (or at least when I was there) Indie music from the 80’s. No problem with that!

I didn’t sample the cakes / food etc. They would have got in the way of my beer and vodka chasers so I can’t comment on the food but it looked good.

This was my favourite place in Krakow. It must have been; I returned there three times over three days in the blazing sun of late August 2025. Yes, the vignette above is a composite piece. All art is, by definition, arrayed in the robe of artifice my friends. I make no apology for that. It’s my literary Impressionism in action.

More? You Want More Krakow?

• For further and more sober insights into Krakow and where else other than a friendly bar to go to, check out the rest of my Krakow Trilogy.

• Interested in Antwerp? If you are, then read my Thoughts from a Bar in Antwerp. If you’re not, read it anyway.

• The search for enlightenment from a barstool moved on through the low countries during The Franco’s Fiesta triptych of 2026. Breda, Moschau and Mons were stops on this ‘Still Hazy After All These Beers Tour’.

• All, of my travels can be read through my City Tours Features Page. You wanna go there, I review it. If it’s in Belgium or Netherlands, of course. Paris perhaps. Burgess Hill.
  
  

Oskar Schindler's Factory: Thoughts

Schindler’s Factory. Krakow

We all saw Schindler’s List

Like many in the 90’s I saw Spielberg’s Schindler's List. Whilst an undoubtedly moving film, it’s probably not one you’d want to watch twice. A tale of one man’s redemption through good works as he battles the Nazi occupiers’ cruelty in their persecution of the Jews in Poland.

I’m in Krakow this week.

This morning I got up early and walked across the Vistula River and onto the Oskar Schindler Museum situated in the same factory buildings where he protected hundreds of Jews from the Nazi authorities and death.

I didn't know what I expected. A worthy museum perhaps, with exhibitions about metallurgy and a dry retracing through the themes of the movie. That’s not what I found.

I would say three quarters of the museum concentrates - through photographs, movies and artefacts - on the history of Krakow during the build up to the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland.

1939 / 1945 - The Nazi Era

You start at the top of the building and work down as the exhibitions take you through life in Krakow through summer 1939 to 1945 and the inhumanity and savagery - even pettiness - of the Nazi occupation. The tragedy of the Polish people generally, and the sizeable Jewish population in particular, is laid out through well chosen and contemporaneous displays.

Aside: It’s quite shocking to see displays of original Nazi regalia, from banners to machine guns, right through to branded tableware. These days the swastika is so verboten it’s quite a reality check to see the real deal that, instead of some lazy reference point, was actually - not so long ago - a living symbol of real evil.

Swastikas aside, there are many other pointed reminders of the executions, restrictions and even the Germanification of Krakow (language, education, housing; even street names). (1) We in Britain, through the English Channel, Spitfires, the Royal Navy, Churchill and good luck (the free Poles too!), avoided having to face this calamity. (2)

Unlike other museums I’ve been to, the fact that this one is sited in the actual location of so much history, is somewhat humbling. (3) A couple of times, I will admit, I was holding back tears. History weighs heavy in the location, in the subject matter. And it wasn’t so very long ago. And, if history is any guide and the human condition doesn’t change - and it won’t - this could be a path we go down again.

It ends with the Soviet occupation in 1945. The Poles gained a country but lost their freedom.

So, what do I conclude about the Schindler Factory?

1) Definitely go to this museum. It’s well worth it and any museum that provokes thought, reflection and a sense of an individual’s heroism against a harsh world is worth the (low) admission price.

2) A renewed hatred of the Nazis. There’s a reason they’re viewed in such disgust. I would caution though that they weren’t the only ones in history with a bad reputation (all countries, peoples and cultures are guilty). They might not be the last.

3) There is hope. I walked back through Kazimierz - the historical Jewish district of Krakow. I sensed no animus but instead saw Jewish shops and restaurants (and even an Israeli flag). Many tourists. History is long with many winding roads shaded from view. Perhaps, sometimes, they lead from a dark place into the light. It’s never perfect though.

Further Notes

1) Ignorant buffoon that I am, a cursory reading of history reveals the Germanification of the Polish language and culture isn’t confined to 1939-45. The whole 19th Century after the Partitions of Poland (1772/95), for example. In the interest of balance, the forced deportations of ethnic Germans from Poland after 1945 shouldn’t be ignored. Which all goes to show, with history, the more you know, the less you really know. Always be alert to simplification, in both broad culture and -most particularly - in the narrow interests of politicians who use collective ignorance to drive a nefarious agenda.

2) The semi satirical American put down of Brits: “You’d all be speaking German if it wasn’t for us,” never felt so chillingly real.

3) A similar sensation you get in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam or The Monument to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror, Prague. Different countries, same tragedy.

Continue reading about Krakow

For a more light-hearted look at Krakow, what to see and do and where to drink and observe, take a look at the rest of my Krakow trilogy!

• What to see, do and avoid in Krakow - local knowledge from a guy who’s been there. Well, once, briefly.

• Thoughts from the BOHO Bar - day drinking, locals and the woman in the red dress.

• I’m not just in Krakow. Try my review of Prague Art Galleries and a Baroque Concert in St Giles Church Prague.

Or just press the big button below.

Thoughts from a Bar in Antwerp

A Tired Seduction in Antwerp

He sits back, laidback, all crotch display, leather jacket and quaffed hair. She’s not the first, the last, or the most important but she is in front of him right now sipping - through a straw - a double gin and tonic though I’m sure she only asked for a single. They smoke. They’re hip, seemingly equal, but this lopsided negotiation has but one outcome. 

So, that’s right in front of me. A tired seduction above 40.

What else? What else?

Family, older father, younger mother watching his beer intake, hunched teenage son. I predict quick sex after some drunken pleading. In a Novotel or Ibis Budget, hopefully not with the child in the same room.

We have Mr Buff, all tight black tee shirt, beard, tattoos and razored hair with obligatory blonde to my left. She’s sat almost on top of him so they must be new or asymmetrical. She rests her face on an elbow in his direction. He leans back; power move. Later, not much later, I suspect he’ll be shaming her into acts that her mother never told her about. Bad boy. Forgotten when she meets the corporate guy with a good income and pension. He’ll not be a bad boy.

Old guy sits on my right in a puffa jacket and a whiskey cocktail. He has his hair but no life, no future. He’s delaying going home to his little flat and a warmed up dinner. He stares into the mid distance, defeat in his eyes. Nothing will happen. Nothing has happened since his wife died ten years ago. 

But wait! Family has allowed the mulleted teenage son to leave and I just saw the older father place his hand on the younger mother’s hand. ‘Yeah, go and look around, sonny. We’ll be here.’ Guy wants to get pissed, she wants a relationship talk. I’m now predicting a long unsurfaced argument will get in the way of that perfunctory sex. Talk is dangerous.

Over to my far right are two older ladies drinking coca cola. As the bottles stand on the table, they discuss their menfolk or lack of and seem very engrossed. Too far away. Too… Yeah.

The family have left together. She looked me in the eye - once, twice - sphinx like in her appraisal as the older husband pays the bill unaware his wife and I shared a moment. A moment she shares a thousand times a day. Does he know, it just takes a brief lowering of his wife’s guard (or regard) and he’s a cuckold risking his pension rights and denied seeing sulky teenager on a regular basis?

I order another Kriek. The waiter’s aftershave arrives before the drink. No peanuts this time.

And apart from an odd guy in a camouflage baseball hat looking at his phone, beyond the too close couple, that’s it? No one else for me to critique on this rainy Wednesday afternoon in Antwerp?

And your author, who is he?

Indeterminate forties / fifties (probably the latter) in a black gilet, Hackett shirt, tapping away at his laptop. Running from life, writing about real life wishing someone - Her? Her? Her? - would see him as a F.Scott Fitzgerald, a Hemingway, an exiled Oscar Wilde (without the gayness, obviously).

Watching the girls go by. Imagining a story within each. Not their worst story. An above average time bar hopping and chatting about history, literature, consensual politics. But, maybe not the best evening ever.

But probably mine. The laptop would disappear and the story would be unwritten. A Secret. Until recalled years later on a blog, as a short story. Names changed, obviously.

A Blonde Beauty

And then a blonde beauty walks in wearing a tight sweater and smiles at me innocently. The world is in that smile. A world of possibility, of redemption, of long overdue new beginnings. Of course, a taller, equally blonde male follows her in tow. Of course. But that smile. That smile, now looking at a glass of Rose as her immature boyfriend makes a show of pouring a Duvet. He plays her a TicToK video and she rests her head on his shoulder.

Young love, eh? Whatever happened to young love? That older couple from earlier on; there was no pretence at world changing romance in their dialogue, within their cocoon. It was, sex or no sex. It was do this or I’m not bothered and I’ve got 20 other women who will. The cracked makeup smudged on a pillow and no follow up the next day. It’s how it is now, yeah?

I hope the young couple next to me make it. Within age lies corruption. They may last. They probably won’t. Then it’s just another - what? - another sad story, unspoken. A failed domesticity only remembered by the two and then asymmetrically as some future partner witlessly blunders into “So, you? How many?”

Each day brings the possibility of immortality. But each day is just, everyday. And everyday is just like the last. 

Carpe Diem, motherfuckers.

Postscript

Later. Another bar in Antwerp. International group speaking English as their Linga Franca. Unfortunately I therefore overhear as they overshare. The women talk excitedly about their facial treatments - what they’ve had, what they will have. The eldest is 35. The 28 year old agrees and swaps her needle around the forehead stories. Silently, I’m appalled. When they move onto STDs and their ‘it was just sex’ anecdotes, I clutch my pearls, pick up my skirts and run. Fun times in Belgium.

The first bar was Castellino - I enjoyed it. Clearly.

There’s More?

Antwerp was a diamond of a place. If you want to read more scabrous stories from bars in Europe - Delft, Bruges, Krakow etc, click below!

F. Scott Fitzgerald - What A Bitch: A Review of Babylon Revisited

“He greeted Marion with his voice pitched carefully to avoid either feigned enthusiasm or dislike...”

— Babylon Revisited - F. Scott Fitzgerald

(In which Tim feigns false modesty as an interesting new way to flex. Reads anew F. Scott Fitzgerald and genuflects before a superior writing talent. There’s gonna be some pretension. There’s gonna be some bullshit. Long blurred bar session profundity! From a bar in Delft.)

Thoughts from Cafe de V, Delft.

I used to think - fleetingly - that my words would stand out in the crowded square of imposters and rivals. That my too personal stories, barely disguised from real life, replete with humorous bon mots were of a durable and sagacious vintage that would elevate my prospects in both the literary and material world.

And, do you know, occasionally - very occasionally - like transient icebergs poking through a storm tossed sea, I felt they did. But each emerging peak, each success, just allowed me a new vantage point upon yet greater heights. Ascending upward, I realised I’d scaled only the foothills, unflattered by the comparisons far above. (1)

On a trip to The Hague recently I took a small, pocket sized copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisted. Reading through, I became aware that I’m (once again) a poor man’s Salieri to Mozart. I’m a good enough writer to recognise I’m a hack writer by comparison. But how? What are those authorial ‘tells’, those embedded hallmarks that shine through flashing greatness?

I would suggest that there are three signs of obvious literary talent. (There’s probably many more, and if I wasn’t in a bar in Delft sampling beers strong and stronger, I’d enumerate them all. But a narrow focus - a well formed list of three - is the consequential benefit one derives from a slow descent into drunkenness, don’t you think?)

1. Prose - I like a well turned phrase

Firstly, concerning the nuts and bolts of writing itself: Is the prose any damn good? In Fitzgerald’s case, yes, very much so. When reading, certain phrases and constructions sing out to elevate the experience above the quotidian, the commonplace, the hackery. All good writers employ stylistic devices, those elegant phrases and tricks that artfully chime like a beautiful bell to the soul. But not all ‘greats’ are the same. To me, slip sliding away into fuzzy numbness here in The Netherlands, there are three types of prose that elevate:

1. Beautiful or lyrical prose (F.Scott. Balzac. Martin Amis, sometimes.)

2. Stripped back writing (Hemingway being an obvious exemplar)

3. Experimental - for example Clockwork Orange, On the Road Again or Last Exit to Brooklyn

Of the three, I value the first most of all. I can almost feel it when a well turned phrase hits home. It almost hurts. Why didn’t I coin this, think of this, work harder on my own flabby prose? Was it lack of work or lack of creativity? Each chiming phrase is a rebuke. I envy. But I recognise the brilliance.

“But the stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American bar anymore - he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it. It had gone back to France.”

— Babylon Revisted F. Scott Fitzgerald

2. Characterisation - The Austen / Dickens Example

Secondly, characterisation. Are the characters well drawn? Are their motivations believable? Is their place in the story apposite, their character sketched sufficiently deeply to avoid becoming cut outs or cyphers, mere third spear carriers from the left wheeled embarrassingly onto the page to mumble a line or two before shuffling off forgotten like a drunken burger after midnight?

As a writer, I find characterisation one of the hardest things to get right. There are some authors who write just for men with the result that their female characters are pale facsimiles of real life women. Similarly, some female writers struggle with male characters and so resort to a stereotypic landscape populated by bastards or wimps. Speaking personally, I don’t have an issue with the sex of my characters. My problem is more fundamental than that. Essentially, any character that isn’t me suffers from that very fact; they are not me meaning they are ill-drawn and one dimensional - pathetic straight men made to suffer my character’s one liners, inner monologue, whilst facilitating tendencious plot development.

But read someone who does it well - an Austen or Dickens, for example - and you roll yourself in a fleshy world of believability. You can imagine the characters in real life, understand why they do what they do, how they drive the plot forward naturally. I’ve always been intrigued how this is done. Do the authors sit down and plan their characters (as suggested by numerous colour-by-numbers writing schools) or do they just carry them in their head and understand each line, each interaction, each movement as they write?

Don’t know. Not a great writer. Ask them.

3. Plot - Not that Important

Thirdly (and lastly) - plot. Writing is telling stories. Is the plot engaging, does it draw you in, want to turn the page, speed read to get to the next chapter akin to binge watching a gripping series on Netflix? Mmmm. There’s many a writer who plots like a mathematician, algorithmically making sure each chapter ends on a cliffhanger, pacing the reader so that the denouement is both satisfactory and surprising. This is where I have my biggest reservation. Although I love a good ending, the symmetry of a three act play or movie or book, part of me loves the realism of unsatisfactory endings. For example, I loved Brett Easton Ellis’ Rules of Attraction that both started and ended in mid sentence, breaking in and then checking out of the narrative. (2) Like life. Unresolved. Messy. Not cute.

Of course, certain genres demand neat plots, crime and thrillers for example, romantic books. And so whilst I respect good plots - no I really do - to me they’re not a deal breaker. But let me interpret plot somewhat more loosely. Let me replace ‘plot’ with ‘narrative’. Does the narrative hold together, does it make you want to stay the course and follow the authorial voice, the characters, the worldview described? Yes? Then you has you a decent narrative.

I don’t necessarily need to know that it was the butler who did it with a candlestick in the library. But I may want to know about the characters’ actions leading up to, and after, during. Not all murders end up with Colonel Mustard buggering Professional Plum in the Hallway. Er, neither does Cluedo Tim.

Yeah. Losing it. Affligem Dubbel kicking in. Bar by a canal somewhere in Delft. (Where? Cafe de V I think, according to the menu) filling up with Dutch people eating, drinking, speaking English when asked. Nice place. You should go there and maybe you too can be weird laptop guy snaffling beers and bitterballen.

So, plot and narrative. Losing the plot. Maintaining a narrative. I’m a real life example of that. Now. But my central point is, tying it all together; I was shocked into wonder, annoyance and competitiveness as to how bloody good Babylon Revisited is.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. What a bitch!

Some Pictures of the beers that helped me write this post. And a Delft canal.

Pretentious Notes

1) Notice how I eschewed the Titanic reference? Eschew the obvious. It’s what separates us from AI. The human brain is - when engaged - synaptically more creative than the AI. That’s what annoys me when people revert through laziness or foolishness to using AI in place of thinking.

2) I now know this starting in the middle thing is called In Medias Res. I warned you at the start of this article I was going to be pretentious but not as annoying I will be next time I find the opportunity to use this Latin phrase. Wanker.

3) Want more? New cities? New rants? Some tourist guides (not much, many from a barstool)? The whole lot of my Scabrous City Tours? Or maybe just Breda where I rocked?

4) An appreciation of Martin Amis is a good place to see why I liked his style. Click away!

5) Delft anyone? Oh fuck it, I forgot to talk about Delft except that I went to a bar (probably two or three) ate fried snacks, drank lots of beer and wrote randomly about ‘writing’. Delft was okay. Would I go again? Probably not. It rained.

Mary Chain, Mascara, Morrissey and Me: SUSSEX University in the 80’s

“Fifteen minutes with you.
Well I wouldn’t say no.”

Nathalie. Or Brigitte? My next door neighbour but briefly - East Slope, Sussex University

East Slope’s Bardot

Nathalie lived next door to me. She was years older - at least four. That was an unbridgeable gap in those days. She appeared experienced and sophisticated in a way that I wasn’t then and probably am not now. And she was also French; dark haired, beautiful, sexy. I’d only gone to university and got Brigitte Bardot living next door to me!

And then, mid-term, she moved out. Our juvenile antics must have irked her. Oh - the bottomless pain of separation! The exquisite misery of emptiness! Surrounded by hundreds of eighteen year olds I was alone, so alone.

I played Hatful of Hollow endlessly. Morrissey incongruously spoke to me. ‘Please, please, please let me get what I want’ he sang through my cheap speakers. There was silence from the empty room next door.

East Slope, Sussex University, autumn term 1986.

---

Revisiting Sussex University

I was driving my daughter around ‘my’ Brighton last weekend. We were stopping off and photographing all my previous addresses throughout Brighton and Hove. Some I stayed at for a matter of weeks, others for several years. Many looked decrepit, a handful were grand, very grand. I had situational memories of all of them. Job. Girlfriend. How cold they were (it was always cold in Brighton flats). My post, Brighton Beach Scumbag, covers memories of Brighton in more depth.

On the way back to Burgess Hill we stopped off at Sussex University. I’d lived in three campus apartments over two years - East Slope, Kent House and Park Village. Let’s see if I could retrace once familiar steps and show my daughter, well what? Where Natalie left me bereft all those years ago? Mmm, maybe not. But where I lived certainly.

But like most universities since the 80’s, Sussex has got bigger - ‘welcoming’ more and more students in order to meet Tony Blair’s ridiculous 50% target. Add to this the maniacal drive to recruit loads of fee paying foreign students and you have a university with near four times the number of ‘clients’ it had when I went there.*

So although we drove past many familiar buildings, there was a new feeling about the campus. It seemed very closed in whereas it always seemed spacious when I was there. Tricks of time, perhaps. Sussex was a relatively small university in the 80’s and the student body was split fairly evenly between public school tossers and the brightest and best of the comprehensive system. 4500 students in all - one third living on campus. It felt like a village. A village out in the Downs, ten minutes train ride from Brighton. It sported Sussex red brick and the architect - Basil Spence - had designed the layout so that it nodded vaguely in the direction of a classical Roman forum. (I know this stuff because I used to do campus tours for prospective parents and students in my third year. £3 a pop, I remember.)

Shades at night! TR in his Kent House student room 1988 - alas the call from the Jesus & Mary Chain never came.

Campus Bars: Julie’s Jinx

There were the bars of course. East Slope bar was notorious because of the cheap drinks, the scrum to get those cheap drinks and the sticky floor caused by said drinks being too difficult for students to navigate the plastic glass of Kronenberg from glass to mouth without spilling. (Pints were 60-70p). Park Village Bar rates a mention as it was the home of the Julie’s Jinx - a pint of every spirit going starting from a base of half a cider. These cocktails never lasted long in your stomach.

Sussex has changed since the 80’s. New high rise accommodation blocks bestride and dominate the northern end of campus. All those extra fee paying students have to live somewhere I suppose. Inside, these alien structures are probably very nice with all the mod cons our current flock of students demand. But the village feeling, the uniqueness of the first red brick university, has gone. And so has East Slope, so named because all the student accommodation was in single story flats rising gently up a hill. All gone. And yes, that flat where I met and then mourned the beautiful Nathalie, now gone completely.

To be fair the other buildings from then to now, looked tired. Park Village looked in particular on its last legs with rotting woodwork, overgrown green spaces, windswept rubbish piled up in corners. Not how I remembered it at all. But then what I truly remember is the spirit, the ephemeral feeling and not just the concrete. I remember the summer of 87, and every window being open and blasting out the newly released Joshua Tree. I remember late night parties and lying on the grass in the warm June air, talking bollocks about politics and music and gossiping over plastic glasses of cheap red wine. I remember reading Wuthering Heights for the first time out on the fields next to Park Village; fields now covered with blocks of flats and car parks.

It’s the people and the time; the young people interacting, doing stuff, each other, laughing and joking that defines a place, an era. I guess I always knew that.

Park Village party, June 1988. TR lying down in white (with hair!)

Then to Now. Gone.

So even before further buildings are torn down, as East Slope has been, the transient spirit my cohort possessed has gone. Each successive intake make their own memories, their own version of what a university community means. But that time is heartbreakingly brief and we’re left - if we ever venture to go back - with the mere bones slowly rotting away. The flesh has long gone. The spirit died the very moment we walked out that last day Summer Term ‘88. And maybe that’s correct.

And Nathalie? Fuck knows. She shacked up with some professor, moved into a flat behind the station in Brighton and - for all I know - got married, had kids and never thinks about me. But if she does I hope she plays The Smiths.

Tim Robson 17B East Slope 1986.

Read on

I don’t just do nostalgia. Oh no. You probably should skip to my Urban Noir collection. Off you go. Read about Bruges, Krakow, Paris, Delft, Antwerp. All over the place, mate, and that’s just the writing.

What about Music? Well, yes Tim, what about music? Glad you asked as I have a large Music Section. 80’s pop, Taylor Swift, Indie Bands, underground 60’s recommendations, the history of my own crap band Shambolic. It’s all there.

Quotidian Notes

1) I like live versions of songs. This solo version from Morrissey - years later, different lyrics - captures the wistfulness of time passed. Hence me selecting it. You’re welcome.

2) You can always recognise my writings by the use of self correcting Notes. The real action, my friends, is down here at the bottom of each article. The use of the word ‘ quotidian’ is a steal from some ex Amex colleague who used it once. Good find. He was a dickhead though.

3) My degree. A Desmond in History. Sussex in the 80’s didn’t allow you to do any degree without interminable sub courses on Marx. Marx’s view on this, Marx’s view on that. All is remember is; it was all bollocks. And that is my definite statement on political economy.

4) Quote at the start “Fifteen Minutes with You…” From Reel Around The Fountain, The Smiths

5) Foreign student income. Perhaps that why the British universities whined like bitches when the uneducated population voted for Brexit? Call me old fashioned (puts down pint) but shouldn’t the primary function of UK universities be to educate the children of this land first?

6) This piece was revised, optimised for clicks in May 2026.

• Fifteen Minutes with You… From Reel Around The Fountain, The Smiths

• Foreign student income. Perhaps that why the British universities whined like bitches when the uneducated population voted for Brexit? Call me old fashioned (puts down pint) but shouldn’t the primary function of UK universities be to educate the children of this land first?