On Friday night I went back to a pub I have not been to in ages. It is an Irish pub called the Auld Shillelagh in Stoke Newington. My ex-girlfriend Jenna used to live in Stokey so I used to spend a lot of time there as well. The inhabitants of Stokey consider it to be a village within a city. Church Street does have a very villagey feel about it, the rest of Stokey I’m not so sure about. So if your village was one long street with bendy buses and London taxis going through it, then fair enough.

Church Street is full of good bars and pubs, fantastic restaurants and cool little shops with friendly people. It was a great place to have on your doorstep. Me and my ex used to spend many evenings dining out there and visiting the pubs and I could write a whole article on Church Street but I’m not going to do that. Maybe sometime though.

But one particular place we used to go was the Shillelagh. Now I’ve been to Irish pubs in Austria, Portugal, even Egypt. And I’ve also been to Ireland. I spent two weeks in Cork with Jenna the year Arsenal got to the Champions League final. So I know what a traditional Irish pub is like, and the Shillelagh is the only place I’ve been to outside Ireland that comes close to replicating that. (And as you can see from the photo, it’s in a prime location nestled between two off-licenses)

I met my friend Marc at Rectory Road overground station. There aren’t any barriers at Cambridge Heath and I know there aren’t any barriers at Rectory Road either, so it’s a free ride unless you get caught. If you do get caught, you can say that the ticket machine was not working and sometimes you will get off with just having to pay the regular ticket price instead of a hefty fine (I think it’s about 50 quid).

I went out with Jenna for a year and a half and during that time I must have got the train between Stokey and Cambridge Heath about 3 or 4 times a week. The journey only takes 7 minutes, so it beats getting the 106 which can take up to an hour some days. During that whole time I only ever saw one ticket inspector, and I was going to Liverpool Street that day so I had a ticket. Now, between Cambridge Heath and Stokey a ticket costs 1.70. If you get the train 3 times a week, that’s £5.10 a week. In a year and a half that works out at £397.80 that you could save by not buying tickets. And all that time I saw just one inspector – it makes you think. How much cheaper would it be to never buy a ticket and just pay the fines every so often?

But anyway, enough about that. As I mentioned I am aware that there are no barriers but for some reason as I was going into Cambridge Heath I had a gut feeling that I should buy a ticket. I bought one, and it nearly made me miss my train. However I scrambled aboard just as the doors started to close. The journey was only 3 stops but I felt myself keeping an eye out for a ticket inspector, half of me actually hoping to see one on the day that I happened to buy a ticket. Until a couple of really hot French girls got on at London Fields and I spent the rest of the journey looking at them instead.

The train rolled into Rectory Road without an inspector in sight. I came out of the station expecting to see Marc but he was not there, so I went into the off license to get myself a beer and a packet of those blue and pink bottle-shaped sweets that I don’t know what they’re called. As I came out of the shop I saw Marc hanging around by the station. He warned me that he was pretty stoned, but that did not come as a shock to me. Whenever I meet Marc I sort of take it as read that he’s gonna be stoned and occasionally am surprised to find that he isn’t.

We walked to the Shillelagh which was about a 5-10 minute walk. It was nice seeing all the old shops in Stokey again and the places I used to go to. I don’t go there that often any more. Marc told me he’d never been to the Shillelagh which surprised me, as he has lived in Stokey for about a year now. I figured he’d like it as he is Irish. I think I’ve only been there once since me and Jen broke up. That was a good 3 years ago and even then I only ended up watching the first half of a Liverpool game with Mikael before we went somewhere else. Yet as soon as we walked in, Marc seemed to adjust to the atmosphere like it was something in his blood, and when we strode up to the bar he started talking to the barmaid and it felt like he was a regular and it was my first time there.

I was glad to see that absolutely nothing had changed. Things are always changing in London, but there are some things that should never be allowed to change. It’s like that pub is my constant, a reminder to the first time I ever went in there, as if frozen in time. I’d like to think that if I went off around the world and came back twenty years later that it would still be the same.

The Shillelagh has a peculiar layout. It’s sort of long and thin with the bar right by the door and then a few steps up to the main seating area, then a beer garden which widens out a bit. Just as you go up the steps there is a table on the right which on a Friday night is always reserved for the musicians, as per a typical Irish session setup. I was glad to see that they still do this, and it wasn’t long before the musicians started arriving. By the time me and Marc were on our second or third pint, the place was in full swing.

We had a good few drinks in there. At one point we even downed a pint each in one go, something I haven’t done for a while. Then Marc announced that he would have to head off as he had to be up for work early the next morning. So we left the pub and suddenly I fancied a kebab – but for some reason I fancied a chicken doner from a particular kebab shop which was in Angel, about 10 minutes away on the bus, as they have the best chicken doner around. So as luck would have it, a 73 came along just as we got to the bus stop. So I said goodbye to Marc and hopped on. Once I’d got my kebab I could get the 38 back home from the other side of the road.

When I was on the bus I was digging around in my pocket for my MP3 player and I pulled out the bag of sweets. Feeling hungry I started to eat them, and before the bus reached Newington Green they were all gone.I got off of the bus a stop too early (I always fucking make that mistake as I forget that there is a bus stop on the corner by the Afghan Kitchen) and started walking towards the kebab shop. However I’d gone no further than two feet when I realised that I didn’t fancy one any more. I’d just eaten those sweets – if you’ve eaten them before you’ll know that they are quite sour – and now a kebab seemed like the last thing on earth I wanted.

I crossed over to the 38 bus stop and the telecaster said it was 16 minutes until the next 38. Fuck that, I thought, and went down the Mucky instead. I remember only planning to stay for one but as it turned out I had about five and was out of it, but I still managed to win 5 games in a row on the pool table!

I crawled into bed about 3, satisfied that it had been a very good night, and was looking forward to seeing Jenna’s band again the next evening.