A tale of two pubs

"We welcome workmen, but please cover your seats for the sake of our other guests."

I'm standing shoulder to shoulder with Welsh partiers in the Wheatsheaf as I contemplate the sign above the bar.

I take another sip of my Guinness and then the meaning comes to me. No, cover isn't being used in the sense of a cover charge. They literally want workers to put a cover on their seats to absorb the grime of a day's labor.

I'm still a little foggy. The transition from dark, brooding Llanthony Forest to a smoky, throbbing Welsh pub has been mind-numbing, and I'm sure the Guinness isn't doing much to clarify matters. I'd try talking to Richy, who stands next to me sipping a soda (he has the common sense to eschew alcohol), but in this pub, the booming bass of Eurodisco does most of the talking. I watch as guys chase girls, girls chase guys and the bartender struggles to keep the social lube flowing.

It reminds me a lot of the bars in Swissvale and Braddock, the sections of Pittsburgh I grew up in. At the the Sportsman's Club, a bartender would begin lining up shots on the bar 10 minutes before graveyard-shift workers at the Union Switch and Signal began streaming out of the plant and across the street in the first hazy halo of daylight.

That's gone now. The Sportsman's Club was a fern bar last time I was in the 'Burgh. The Union Switch and Signal, a maker of railroad signals, was razed to put up a shopping mall.

Wales seems to know the same song. I recall my conversation with the bartender at the Coach and Horses in Abergavenny last night. "They had nothing to do but drink ..."

The Wheatsheaf wears us down after only one pint, and we set off in search of another pub, perhaps somewhere a bit quieter and less crowded.

We find it, a strange little neighborhood place that I never catch the name of. The bar divides the pub into two sections: When you enter, you can choose a door on either the left or the right. To the right, our first choice, we find a room oddly like a living room, where folks sit around talking and sipping pints of ale. It's crowded, but not so much so that we can't find a table. As we sit, we notice that across the bar is another room with a dart board, a fireplace and a little more space. We order a few pints and head over there, passing through the entry way again and into the room.

The younger folks seem to frequent this side of the pub (some of the girls, in fact, don't look much older than 14 or 15.) After another Guinness and a game of darts (in which I perform miserably, not even knowing the rules) we decide to return to The Held.

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