ABSTRACT

It was eight o’clock on Friday night, in Leeds city centre. The pub was at the upper end of Eastgate, before it meets the Headrow. The architecture was Edwardian, like many of the other buildings around there. It looked oppressive, with its decades of Leeds subsistence, and it was dirty: stained with acid rain, welkin muck and starling shit. We entered the pub, not for any particular reason, but simply because it seemed to be the most natural place for us to be, the uncultivated house fittings and furbishing a part of our sense of belonging. The pub was very much part of our Leeds, ‘town’, an imaginary Leeds dislocated by time, ostensibly narrow, among parts of which we regularly meandered across well worn tracks. Like the atmosphere, everything in the pub seemed familiar to us: the sense of heady conviviality, the sort of women there, the gamut of working-class male strangers, more so the prospect of heavy alcohol consumption. You could say the barman was in some sense ours, too, for before we had so much got through the doors his fat, tattooed fingers were already fumbling in the cooler at the back of the bar. Even our choice of drinks was part of this communal ritual, for he knew which one we would choose before we said it.