‘What’s this King William pub?’ I hear you inquire. As Daryl Somers used to remark, ‘I’m glad you asked.’ The CBD has a new boozer but is it just the old Ambassadors tarted up and rebadged? We were about to find out.
I’ve limited recollection of the former tavern but know it was one patronised by our old school friend Davo when he wasn’t wading through an elongated Friday lunch at The Griffins Head. Come to think of it, not a traditional culinary meal as I’m confident Davo doesn’t eat food.
Claire suffered a morning blowout on her acutely heeled shoe and like the Better Home and Gardens craft-segment host she secretly aspires to be, taped it up with clandestine assistance from some borrowed office supplies. It was fortunate that we only needed a brisk stroll from her Light Square workplace and so the only victim was the reduced opportunity for mystery to build for Mystery Pub (a key ingredient), but like Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, neither of us cared.
Aggregated on the wooden bar were three softly glowing lamps offering unexpected contribution to the ambiance. Adelaide pubs are over lit (fluoro the darkest crime, ironically) and could learn from the moody atmospherics of hotels in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. Once, inside two evenings I visited ten of these for research purposes although the resultant scientific paper remains troublingly unpublished or even peer reviewed.
Featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, I lately read ‘The Hound of The Baskervilles’ and wondered what the Londoner sleuths would make of the pub’s beer situation. I probed, ‘Why don’t you have Coopers Pale Ale on tap?’ Mine host retorted, ‘We’re having trouble getting any.’ Peculiar, I thought, doffing my woollen cap, and extracting a pipe from the pocket of my houndstooth jacket. Noticing my appearance in the barroom mirror I was baffled to observe that in the hour since leaving my employment I’d grown a dapper, entirely Edwardian, moustache.
Safely in the beer garden there was however a sharp smell of fresh paint and utilising my detective skills I rapidly deduced that a person or persons had applied tint to the walls, probably during this past day. Inspecting the exposed bricks and decorative ladders which added to the interior design, we procured a table and during our two-drink sojourn, multitudes of Crows fans arrived with sunny expectation upon their faces, and this proved, of course, to be wholly without logic or reward.
The relationship between text and context is at its most fascinating when the boundary between these is indistinguishable. If the pub was our text and the context was our discourse, I then relished that fantastic experience of the immediate surroundings essentially vanishing as Claire recounted several items from her day. This was a delight.
A rotund troubadour then commenced a set of songs on his guitar to which he added his unexceptional singing. He played Vance Joy’s ubiquitous ‘Riptide’ and later, ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ by the Beatles. While it incorporates splendid sitar moments from George Harrison, I newly learnt that my wife finds little value in this tune and admit that it wouldn’t make my top fifty of the Liverpudlians. Their number one? ‘And Your Bird Can Sing.’
Our scrumptious but wretchedly delayed potato dinner devoured, we farewelled the ghastly paint and the visible bricks and the now vanished musician and the ghostly lamps and the lack of kegged Coopers beer and ventured once more into the pulsing, discordant Friday city.
Alighting onto the footpath I said to Claire, ‘Careful in those shoes.’
mickeytales 