Look, let’s not get into the specifics of how I ended up in a Clapham chain pub on a recent windblown Thursday.
Let’s not, if you don’t mind, fully examine the mostly benign proclivities (Premier League football, draught Guinness) that nudged me and a similarly afflicted mate towards the infernal heart of the big O’Neill’s by the Tube station. But, let me just say: if you were to imagine all the stereotypically unkind things one might hear about the cultural landscape of Clapham — the older man brutalising Mustang Sally on the karaoke machine; the unbussed tables of half-eaten nachos; the innumerable, White Claw-chugging Australians in muscle vests — then you’d have seen them physicalised in screaming, half-cut Technicolor on that night.
