It was another derisory distance to the next stop, Church Street. There was a pub right next to the tram platforms, so paying a visit to the Gun Tavern was inevitable.

Eyes wide shut

This establishment was very different to the Old Brief Ale Café. If the latter could be described (by Time Out, for example) as a “fin de millennium urban hunting-lodge”, then it wouldn’t be too wide of the mark to say that the Gun Tavern is “part suburban arsenal, part old man’s watering-hole”.

Whilst Tim, Alex and myself stocked up on peanuts, and enjoyed the musical treat of Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” – a song which perhaps triggered our later decisions during the “Sound of Music” forfeit at Therapia Lane – Simon defected to do some record shopping, while Pad again set out in search of something which he wouldn’t tell us about. This time, however, he came back with a knowing – and, dare I say it, wry – smirk on his face. In retrospect, I am not sure why Simon’s decision to go shopping rather than drinking was not treated with more severity by the other members of the group.

The beers on offer in the Gun were nothing to write home about. But I’m going to anyway: Pad had a Courage Best, Tim wisely stuck to a bottle (Holsten), and Alan – by now clearly committed to the Dark Side of lager drinking – had a Carling. The rest of us went for some Young’s which would have been unmemorable, had I not remembered to write it down. Still, I think we generally preferred the rather more, ahem, “traditional” feel of the Gun to the previous pub:

While we were waiting for the next tram, Alan and I had espied a pie ’n’ mash shop across the street, and struck up a particularly petty argument about what constituted “The Liquor” in the context of this culinary art. I was convinced that “The Liquor” was the chili vinegar, while Al maintained that it was the parsley sauce. Although I have to concede the error of my ways, I do think that the response we were given when we went in and asked bolstered my point of view somewhat: when Al pointed at the sauce being poured onto a pie and enquired, “Is that ‘The Liquor’?”, the bloke serving retorted with the devastating existential riddle of “Well, it’s whatever you want it to be, isn’t it?”

Dazed by this epiphanic outburst, we stepped back out onto the Croydon pavement and returned to the safer world of drinking.