All-night cellar bar

I mentioned in my last haiku that I had a particularly good last night in Edinburgh this year.

I'd been to see the Tom Waits tribute show I briefly reviewed at the end of my roundup of Fringe recommendations this year. It finished about 1.30am. My companion suggested we go for "one last drink" somewhere. Now, this is still a wee bit of a problem in Edinburgh. It's better than a few years ago, when almost none of the city centre pubs were able to get late licences during the Festival month, and if you got a late-night drinking urge on you, you had to go wandering towards the seedier outskirts. There'd usually be somewhere off Leith Walk that was either legitimately staying open till 1 or 2am , or was indulging in a lock-in; but some of those places were pretty darn rough. Not the kind of place I would have wanted to take my companion (although, I suspect, she would have taken such an environment in her stride far more readily than me).

The downstairs bar at The Assembly Rooms (where we'd just been watching the Waits show), we learned, was open till 4am; but the place is severely lacking in atmosphere. We thought we'd keep that in mind as a fall-back option if we struck out everywhere else. We tried the Café Royal; there's usually a late-night comedy show upstairs, so I thought it might have been keeping serving till 2am or so - but no. We tried the Lord Bodo, one of the less scary 'dives' I've found in the city (conveniently across the road from 'The Stand' comedy club, and just around the corner from my friend Amanda's flat); it was just closing. Damn. The staff there recommended a piano bar called Fingers as being the only place nearby that was likely to be staying open late. I wasn't that keen: I'd never actually been there before, didn't have a clear idea of how to find it, and it was quite a way from where we were.

Thus, my companion and I were blundering around rather aimlessly, wondering half-heartedly if we should try to find this Fingers place; I was on the brink of quitting and calling it a night.

But then we saw some people spilling out of a doorway just ahead of us. It looked as if this place might be closing too, but we asked the guys on the door and they told us...... they were open till 4am. RESULT!!! In the event, they stayed open till 5am. HIGH-SCORE BONUS!!!!

It was an unremarkable cellar bar on a Mexican theme, but it was still doing a brisk trade (the advantage of being the only place still open within a mile or more radius!); and one Dos Equis led easily to another..... and another...... and another....... and another..... and another (and a tequila chaser or two along the way as well).

Emerging from that womb-dark seclusion, brain-dazed, disorientated, with no idea of the time, and finding a huge dawn sky painted in the most exotic colours was..... well, breathtaking.

I think I'll be seeking out this bar again next year on the basis of that memory alone. I just hope I can find it again - I have only the vaguest idea of where it is, and no idea at all of what it is called.