The Bullingdon Arms

Ah, The Bullingdon - or The Bully, as it was generally known. I confess I was just a little intimidated by it when I first encountered the place as a student. It wasn't at all one of the rougher or more hostile pubs in East Oxford; but all the pubs in East Oxford had the reputation of being at least a little bit rough, and decidedly student-averse. And The Bully was - at the time - flamboyantly, aggressively Irish as well, which added an extra air of potential trouble to it. (I haven't now been back there for some years, but I'm sure I heard some time ago that it had undergone a radical personality swap with another pub in that neighbourhood, and had transformed itself into a West Indian pub. Must go back and check that out some time.)

It wasn't long, though, before I began to spend more and more time out east in the Cowley-Iffley triangle, and it came to be one of my favourite parts of the city - in large part precisely because students were comparatively thin on the ground there. And so I began to become familiar with, and even comfortable in some of these rather unwelcoming bars that I'd once been so nervous of entering, they became my favourite refuges.

I think I really started warming up to The Bully in my 3rd year (of 5, arguably 6....) - which was a kind of delayed 'gap year' (hey, I called it 'sabbatical', they called it 'rustication'). I was living in East Oxford, not far away; and for several months I had a job at the despatching warehouse of the publishers, Basil Blackwell's, which was just around the corner. So.... it had become my local patch; and I was a regular working guy now, not a bloody student any more. I felt safe enough going in there; I felt entitled. Friday lunchtime drinks in The Bully with colleagues on the monthly payday became quite a regular little indulgence for a while (well, either there or the next-along Ampney Cottage - but let's not confuse things).

Having established that necessary initial degree of recognition and acceptance there, it soon became a regular highlight of my traditional St Patrick's day pub crawl (usually in the company of The Bookseller, of course; and I think at least once, a few years later, in the company of The British Cowboy). The landlord, I remember, used to celebrate his national identity on that day by wearing a green blazer and an orange bow-tie. Ah, St Pat's in The Bully - there was usually a free pot of Irish stew on the bar, a decent fiddle band playing in the corner.... and one of the best pints of Guinness you could find in Oxford (all the better for being heavily discounted on that night).

Two particular memories stand out from my trips to The Bully (probably not that many trips in all, truth be told).

St Patrick's Night - 1987, I think it must have been. I'm on the traditional pub crawl with my mate Richard (yes, the one who originally lured me to China all those years ago), who happens to be living in the vicinity himself that year. We arrive at The Bully mid-evening, just as the band is about to get going. And the place is PACKED, fuller than I've ever seen it. There is scarcely a square foot of free floorspace. But Richard decides...... he wants to play darts. We had both liked the game from childhood, and had recently got into a habit of having a few games together whenever we were out having a drink. But neither of us was really very good, to be honest. The idea of playing in front of any onlookers at all usually unsettled me deeply. The idea of playing in front of hundreds, many of whom we had had to ask to make space in front of the board (many of whom were, indeed, still so close to the board that they were in acute danger of being maimed by any wild throws or unlucky rebounds) elicited something very close to FEAR.

But, somehow or other, this extreme stress focused our minds wonderfully. We were quite happy to quit after a single game, to let the crowd expand back into the corner by the dartboard, because we both realised that we would probably never play as well again in our entire lives. We had, by some amazing quirk of fate, managed to look competent in front of this teeming and potentially hostile crowd. No, more than that, we had managed to look good; we had managed to look almost like professionals. I think we both hit at list one treble-20 with each visit to the oche, scoring consistently around 100; and then Richard, as soon as he got on a double, nailed it with his first or second dart. I think it might well have been a 15-dart finish, or maybe even a little better. And I was hot on his heels the whole way, having started second. I don't think either of us had ever come close to doing that before - or would ever do so again. One brief, shining moment.

The other great attraction of The Bully was its tiny snug around the back. The walls were festooned with Gaelic football jerseys. There were two (or was it three?) pumps for Guinness behind the bar, and nothing else. And there was a fantastic jukebox, full of old '50s and '60s classics. I don't recall quite how this came about (though, obviously, the consumption of large amounts of alcohol will have played a part), but on one occasion I think Richard and The Bookseller and I were crammed in there with two or three random strangers when one of us had the idea of putting on Chain Gang, the classic song by R&B great Sam Cooke (it was probably me; I was going through a big Sam Cooke phase at the time). And we all joined in. The song is well suited to such impromptu group performances, since it includes so many discrete elements: we left someone who could actually more-or-less sing to try to carry Sam's falsetto part; there was a big guy in the corner who lent his throaty bass to introducing the chorus with a lampshade-rattlingly-deep "Well, don't you know...."; while the rest of us joined in on "... that's the sound of the men working on the chain ga-a-ang"; we also provided the rhythmic background grunting of the convict labourers ("oooh - hah; oooh - hah") and mimicked the clang of their pickaxes with pens or cutlery rapped against the side of empty pint sleeves.

We had so much fun, we did it again. And possibly even a third time.

Simple pleasures.