**For forthcoming Irish Pubs of the week, see https://www.instagram.com/publicanenemy/

“I’ve been waiting

for a Pub like you

To come into my life”

2 nights previous, I decided to watch the football. In modern times , this usually means finding an illegal stream on your phone, off of a website flanked by a never ending chat box of stream-of-consciousness- mindlessly-offensive racist drivel typed up by anonymous trolls .Just like in Grandad’s day! I subsequently go on to miss all of the game’s 5 goals due to incessant buffering and constantly having to snipe pop-ups like its Stalingrad circa 1943 only this time the enemy is Bet365 ads

Dismayed by this, for the next game, I decide to watch as God intended. In a pub surrounded by people disproportionately invested in it. So my friend suggested a nearby Gooner pub, the Florín on Holloway Road, North London, a stronghold of Arsenal, the historic team of choice of the London Irish .

The pub itself is a free-standing building consisting of one big saloon like in the Wild West. Once the football commences though, it is transformed into a cinematic football experience, lights down low, complimentary cracker platters set out, the pool table covered. Everyone is facing the screen, the atmosphere only slightly dulled by Tom postulating on the age old question whose success was more hard-won – The Beatles or Taylor Swift?

Special mention at the Florín must go to the pint. Yeah yeah, they have the Excellent Guinness plaque, sure. I know people are quite invested in Pint-chat, and I don’t really know the science of it all to be fair. What I do know is , the Floirín is the only pub outside of Ireland where when you spill some, it turns not to a mere liquid but to solid cream. It’s not just a good pint. Its molecular structure is superior to all others. It’s like a different substance. These pints are dangerously good, so smooth they are. And the staff here are exactly how Irish pub staff should be: friendly, efficient, piss-taking, perfect pouring.

So although Arsenal lose, we stay as the other game goes to penalties, thus swelling the coffers of the pub for a further few minutes of drama. To watch a penalty shootout in a pub is a grand thing. The multitudes become experts in body language and non-verbal paralanguage, gleefully declaring with sureity who’s going to miss only to casually dismiss it all once they score, a bit like those cults who keep moving the final date of the apocolypse every time it doesn’t happen . A big game is a lifeblood of a pub, and I’m glad to have found such a fine spot to watch. As weary disheartened Gooners peel away from the premises, I realise that although I came in a stranger, I leave as a floiringner.