That said, I don't have any great affinity for the Gardies. I've gone there exactly once. The other day, at the (northern) end of an impromptu pub crawl with one Ronnie Flotsam, troubadour to the pissed cunts of London, brother to the pissed cunts of this chair. (We weren't actually aware it was marked for destruction or even on the auction block when we wandered in for a couple of pints of Summit. It happened to be there and so did we.) Let's not mince words, it was and is shabby as fuck. A poo-brown brick blockhouse out of the Legoland school of architecture, with a dilapidated beer garden strewn with broken furniture, more akin to the backyard of one of the neighbouring student flats than a licenced house of ale. But, unlike the shiny, overhyped, conspicuously empty Cook a few blocks away, the kids of North D were actually happy to turn up to the Gardies and sink a few sharpies and a few pool balls on a sunny Saturday afternoon, instead of hanging out in their scabby fucking flats. And that's the thing. Uni bars aren't meant to be shiny. They're meant to be functional. Like the backyards, living rooms and garages of the student flats they stand as proxies for.If anything, I'd compare the Gardies to the old '90s uni bar at UNSW, the Squarehouse. Same conspicuous lack of architectural merit, same strangled greenery, same sense of dilapidated, hard-used utilitarianism. And yet the same sense of good times having been had, and likely to continue as such, within those '60s-vintage poo-brown brick walls. Well until the cheque cleared from the Registry mandarins at least. Despite it being less attractive than the back end of Mr Shuffles, I've still got a soft spot for the old UNSW Squarehouse, more so than the Roundhouse which replaced it. But this is the point: anyone who didn't know it, wouldn't care that they'd missed out. They'd be in precisely the same position I was on moving up to UQ and hearing endless tall tales and true of the glory days of the Rec Club. It was gone by the time I got there, lost to mythology - like the Squarehouse for anyone who went through UNSW a few years after me, or the Gardies and Bowler for next year's influx of Otago first years. This is the nature of the iconic watering holes of your past: once they're lost, they mean nothing to the people who never knew them but a bunch of old, faded stories from a bunch of old, faded hellraisers.
Still won't make a fucking lick of difference about how wasted the first-years get in their flats before heading out, though.
Anyhoo we'll throw the question over to the panel - stories of long, lost watering holes of one's old, faded, hellraising (or otherwise) past?
The Doctor is OUT.
