July 2025. Glasgow.
A Tuesday afternoon in the West End of Glasgow with Duncan “Pubmeister” McKay, a man determined to prove Scotland deserves its GBG allocation.
But first, he’d prove the grandeur of Argyle Street,
looking particularly majestic on the entry into Partick, with my 3rd GBG newbie across the street.
The Lismore is a symphony in brown, even from outside, a self-styled “world famous whisky bar”,
heaving with mature punters on trad music afternoon.
How had I not heard of the Lismore before ? Worth a visit just for the crooner and the windows.
How wonderful to still be able to discover new classics as I approach middle-age.
No space in the main bar, so we retire to the back room where local CAMRA legend Brian joins us to insist I visit the Gents.
The music is sensational, the second Irish beer in a row a bit less so, but it matters not a jot.
The urinals are dedicated to those who suffered in the Highland clearances. I’m tempted to cheer Colonel Fell but as the lone Sassenach in a pub of Scots I choose to just p**s on his name.
Right, follow those men,
it’s time to go underground.
retiredmartin 
It’s a pity that the average everyday English doesn’t feel as aggrieved about Inclosure as his Scottish peer does about the Clearances – exactly the same thing.
If he only had done, then we’d probably have been spared predominantly Tory rule for the last several generations, but it generally wasn’t taught in schools. Instead kids were made to recite the tedious succession of royals, and their respective marriages.
I was taught that the Domesday Book was a record of who “just happened to own everything” rather than one of to whom of his thugs William I had handed the land out, after taking every square inch of it from the inhabitants.
Well, it saved the country from socialism I suppose…
Less is more, but the Lismore is more than most pubs and none the less for that.
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Could it be that, by not having a state of their own, Scottish and Welsh people went to greater lengths to pass on history themselves rather than leaving it mostly in the hands of the state’s education system nor the state church (which they didn’t follow), so it had a different slant? Just a theory.
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A good theory.
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